On Nov 11, 2:36*pm, "Mizter T" wrote:

The ongoing unreliability of the Thameslink route is the stuff of legend,
which is a great shame as it's such a useful service when it works
properly


Indeed.

And I share your concerns.

As I'm sure most uk.railway contributors must be fed up of reading, I
am a Luton / London Thameslink commuter, and while 60-80% of my
journies do not go south of West Hampstead on Thameslink I still get
hot by core problems.

Fridays incident is perhaps not so typical of the many recent events,
rather one more in the range of what can happen on any line.

But it still had symptoms of one major major issue with the service
that GoVia did have and FCC seem to have exacerbated and NR certainly
has - and that is lack of resilience.

Not only has the TL Project eliminated Moorgate forever as a rat-run
escape route, there are turnback restrictions at City TL, a crossover
is permanently removed at Farringdon because of the 12car works, and
at present the bays at Blackfriars are not there.

If goes on - when the route has 12car trains, can't turn back at
StAlbans - yes the platforms can take 12 but the turnback siding is
still 8. Can't turnback [either way] even empty 12car at Kentish Town,
because not only is the (well known) issue of not extending to 12car
for service a limit but the signalling is laid out for 8car dead.
Blackfriars bays - when these are open are they 8car only ? AIUI some
or all of them yes, which again means no 12car turn back.

StPancras high level was ruled out years ago. In the normal weekday
service - even off peak - there is no platform space there. You can
turn back in low lvel between SPI and Farringdon, but this is slow,
allegedly they won't turn more than 4 TPH there, but I don;t know why
its quite that low, I reckon 6 TPH ought to be feasible, but I'd need
expert advice on that.

All this is very important, because there will be many more 12car
trains than 8car. On the north side once in the open air, the only
actual stations where you can turn 12car in service recovery will be
West Hampstead, Luton and Bedford.

Now the knee jerk argument to this is the service pattern at them
moment only goes to Luton and Bedford, and thats where the TOCs have
made things worse. There is no train crew resilience. They are unable
to do short turnbacks (even ignoring cancellation penalties for doing
so) because crews are in the wrong places.

They only have 3 depots - Bedford Blackfriars and Brighton.
Blackfriars !!! That NBG to anybody when the core is closed.

When the GN route is connected I see this getting worse. because what
will start to happen is something will go wrong and say a NB GN bound
train will be in the core with a GN-side TL driver, the junction fails
and there no driver to take in on the ML route. This WILL happen.
Youve then got a situation where 8 of 24 TPH have lost the route
through the source failire, and 16/24 screwed up becaus eone train has
no knowledge.

If I were running it I'd have all crew know all routes, throughout,
and have appropriate diagrams, but I know thats expensive. I certainly
expect all GN crew to know at least as Cricklewood to dump a train,
and all ML crews to know Hornsey ditto, and things like Brighton crews
to know SE routes if they happen to be on a SB that needs to be dumped
at (say) Orpington. But if you look at precedence - that dispute this
time 2 years ago was all about the parsimonouos way they were going
about crew training on 377s and lack of crews for KO0.

I've been to 4 public lecture on TL project, 2 given by senior NR
people, one to IET, and despite reading this stuff in detail, and
every other TLP paper, I understand the tekkie stuff about ATO and 24
TPH and all the rest - but I fail to see where any of this works with
the way the previous and current TOC run the service and the lack of
resilience.

--
Nick