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Old June 6th 12, 07:37 PM posted to uk.railway,uk.transport.london
Neill Neill is offline
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First recorded activity at LondonBanter: Feb 2007
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Default Can the Railways Cope with the Olympic Crowds?

On Jun 6, 6:01*pm, Mizter T wrote:
On 06/06/2012 13:36, Recliner wrote:









On Wed, 6 Jun 2012 05:22:21 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:


IMHO - NO!!


Judging by the fiasco of handling the cold, wet and bedraggled crowds
in London over the last four days of the Jubilee Shen. (= shenanigan
as in alt.shenanigan) I don't think that they have a chance.


None of the traincos. ran a Saturday service. None put on extra
coaching stock. Many thousands were left on platforms unable to board
the cattle trains they needed to get to London.


I thought the problems were mainly on the Sunday, when they ran only a
normal or slightly enhanced Sunday service for what turned out to be
much larger crowds than they expected. From what I heard, trains
worked OK on the other days.


I think Southeastern at least were running longer trains on Sunday. I
read a suggestion that public interest in the Thames Pageant event had
perhaps been rather underestimated by some (perhaps including TOC planners).

Anyway, even if public transport performs reasonably well during the
Olympic Games, I'm sure it'll be a complete shambles according to CJB's
expert assessments...


There did seem to be a huge lack of planning, especially over the
Sunday. The stewards were offensive, probably due to being forced to
sleep on the streets and then having to work 14 hours without being
allowed to go to the toilet, all this for sod all money. Why cannot we
plan for this sort of thing in this country? If you think a million
people are possibly going to be jammed into a very small area of
London, twenty metres either side of the Thames from Battersea to the
Tower, why run a Sunday service. Don't they learn form the past? I'm
waiting for the headlines on July 28th, its not beyond imagination
that there will be a total failure to cope the night before

Neill