Excellent PA announcement this morning

@ swiss..,

Your posting helps identify the driver.
Telling pax the train is held together with blu-tak might lead to a disciplinary or at least "getting his card marked"
Not a good idea.

Especially as you have quoted a unit number.

You KNOW stock is not held together with blu-tak. Think of the possible consequences of your posting.

My sincere apologies, that was not my intention I can assure you.

I wonder if there is any possibility that the driver/controller would be disciplined for not following procedure and removing the train from service as soon as possible

Hopefully not! The point I was making was mainly about customer service. As I said the easy solution would have been to put the train away. As a result customers would have been disadvantaged in the height of the morning peak. This driver and the controller were clearly thinking ‘out of the box’. In my view the rule book exists as a basic tool to running the railway. It cannot cope with every eventuality on such a diverse railway. Perhaps things got a bit out of hand in the 90s with the phone book size rule books that were introduced after the Kings Cross fire. Problem with these descriptive procedures is that staff often failed to read them. Hands up – I never did either! Thankfully LUL have moved away from these.

The trouble is the rule book cannot be there for every eventuality and perhaps in some cases the rule may no longer be entirely appropriate. In some cases the old rule book referred to actions such as “come to a complete understanding with (others) etc”. This means that within parameters staff can work to the best interests of the railway, having discussed how a particular procure is to be carried out.

I think we should expect that experienced railwaymen (and women) can make a reasoned judgement. If they believe that customer interests would have been largely prejudiced by safety or other reasons such as, perhaps creating an unacceptable delay. Withdrawing the train might have been at least one solution – But its not the only solution.

Obviously with an A stock you could have cut a car out. But with an S stock that’s probably a lot more difficult. This in itself shows the efforts this driver and those involved went to.

Unlike the other instance referred to, the drivers tone in this case clearly implied that he and his colleagues had tried their level best. At no time did he make any negative remarks about the customer who was ill, the train or his colleagues. Perhaps there might have been ample opportunity to do so. The end result were customers who were ‘on-side’. I happened to hear one customer on her mobile phone discussing the incident. At no time did she refer to LUL in a negative way, such as “the trains late again”. Clearly these things have a wider impact – often beyond the initial incident.

With my old hat on – there are many, many members of LUL staff who go above and beyond reasonable expectations because they want to see the railway running at its best. In this instance I judged that to be the case. And in fairness I thought their actions were commendable. I don’t think any transport operator could ask for more! Hence the reason why I pointed this out.

So as a postscript I have already received a positive reply from Angela Back the Metropolitan Lines General Manager. And it seems the Met line agrees!

Dean

[s. except D.Sullivan of course