On Jan 6, 2:26*pm, Patrick Osborne wrote:
Why would they make trains wait for ages rather than
turning them around urgently? *Does the signalling not permit it? *If
not, why not? *And how does it cope with the scheduled turnarounds at
Arnos Grove?

Don't know; possibly not; possibly because it'd involve expensive
infrastructure upgrades that'd only occasionally be needed; and
because turning round a train in 10 minutes is a lot easier than
turning one around in 2m30s.

I'm really not a tube-basher and I think that on balance the tube does
pretty well at providing a service. *However, I do think that they are
very unprepared for when things go wrong and seem incapable of dealing
with incidents quickly to stop them becoming major headaches.

Information, when an incident is first starting to kick off, is the
worst bit. The number of times I've been on a service at a station
with multiple alternative options when things have gone wrong, and
have ended up picking the wrong one (despite having a better idea
about the system than most) because of inadequate/untimely/completely
false advice is definitely too high.

Although of course it's easy to say that they could run things better
when we don't know all the constraints, but it does seem to me that
they could have done better in this instance, based of course on what
I've read here!

It's difficult to say without knowing more about the problem (e.g. if
the broken train had broken coming out of the depot onto the
southbound=westbound between Cockfosters and Oakwood, then you
wouldn't be able to turn anything round north of Arnos and get it back
down south again), as you say.

I'm pretty certain there's someone at TfL charged with putting exactly
these kinds of questions to Picc and Tube Lines management, to ensure
that they do have the best contingencies possible given their
resources. It'd be nice to see exactly how that process works, and
what the problems were this time...

--
John Band
john at johnband dot org
www.johnband.org