Service reliability

The Walthamstow MP Stella Creasy shared the below on Facebook following her interaction with TfL regarding the reliability and station closures:

"Walthamstow - I continue to be in regular contact with TFL about the problems with the Victoria Line. Below is an update on my discussions with them today about these issues - please share with others to keep them posted on what's happening so you can all plan your travel accordingly. Thank you!

On today's disruption (Monday 16th Jan) and Easter disruption:
TFL say they had problems at Euston which were technical i.e. with a rail which had to be fixed when it broke. They say this is very unusual as the Victoria line 'their best line' in terms of efficiency and infrastructure and don't believe today's incident is connected to any larger problem. Furthermore, I want to give residents advance notice that they have plans at Easter to increase the frequency of trains on our line to 36 per hour at peak times (and 30 trains an hour on a Saturday for longer too) To do that, they say they will need to close the line over the Easter Bank Holiday to upgrade the software the trains run on - so be aware it will be closed for four days then but you'll get a better service afterwards with more trains which run all the way to Walthamstow.

On Blackhorse Road and Sudden Station Closures:
TFL recognise the service residents in Walthamstow have had has not been good enough. They have given me the following statement about this, and Blackhorse Road station in particular, and their plans to invest in recruiting more staff to stop this happening and ensure there are enough staff to cover all the stations. This should kick in within the next few weeks and I'll be monitoring this and following up any unplanned closures too, so will be feeding back to residents via my weekly e-newsletter on this issue if there's any cause to believe these problems will not be resolved or there could be further closures.

"Regarding Blackhorse Road and nearby stations, we clearly have not offered the services that our customers expect or deserve. As you know we implemented our new station staffing model last April which is taking time to bed in. It is clear that the resourcing at Blackhorse Road and surrounding stations needs some adjustment. We have always intended to review staffing levels and have already started to recruit 200 extra staff and this is likely to increase further. The recruitment process will take some time, but I have instructed the team to prioritise the resource needs at Blackhorse Road and the surrounding stations to deliver the level of services our customer need. In the meantime, we have drawn up emergency plans to support the existing station staffing resources. Please bear with us as we continue to do all we can to keep the station open.""

Thanks for sharing that as I'm not on Facebook and don't follow Ms Creasey on Twitter / via the web.

Shame that she's been misinformed about the Easter closure. The Planned Closures list shows the line closed for 2 days not 4. I can't believe that TfL would shut the Vic for 4 days over Easter. Even 2 is going to be a bit of a stretch with people returning on the Monday evening from weekends away.

I see it was a broken rail. I thought it had to be given a partial line suspension for 5.5 hours. Only something that catastrophic, in failure terms, would necessitate that scale of intervention. It's a bit ridiculous that I have to get this info via my MP via social media and a transport forum. I know LU put out an apology but why don't they say what actually failed? Might help people understand the seriousness of the problem. I am not sure I believe it is a "one off". There have been repeated problems for weeks with signals, points and rolling stock failures. A broken rail is just a more serious failing in a litany of problems. I asked the Line Manager when she was last on Twitter if there was a "trend". She said not but I'm very sceptical that you can get so many one off or random problems but with an increasing regularity. The odd one weeks apart then OK but that's not what is happening. Something is amiss somewhere - we're just in the denial stage at the moment and then eventually the engineers will go "erm, actually yes we changed this, that and the other thing and erm we've got worsening trends now". Seen it before on more than one line.

So, essentially, it's a great big cock up on staffing at the North End of the line and we just have to put up with up and hope for the best in the meantime. Marvellous. I expect any permanent resolution is linked into solving the "ticket office" dispute so we could be either days or months away from a resolution depending on who digs their heels in the most. Thank goodness I am not commuting any more and can be more selective as to when I use the line. Pity the poor souls who have no option.

Absolutely reasonable for her to - her constituents use the line to get to work. If she gets PR out of it, good for her. Various MPs for Putney have done similar about the crossover at Earls Court, over the last 25 years

As for the information, I hadmthe misfortune to need the Victoria Line at 8:20 yesterday. Information was completely lacking and, by the time I'd taken the Northern via London Bridge, I knew thanks to last week's strike that I could have walked to Waterloo faster.

No the mayor still in power

Eh? The previous Mayor supported the policy which closed ticket offices and reduced staffing. He was lucky enough to escape from office before an overtime ban was imposed which exposed some of the flaws of the policy he endorsed. I understand there are a load of other issues that have affected staff and morale but these haven't hit the headlines / obviously impacted lots of passengers.

To be fair the new Mayor asked for a review, got it done, accepted the recommendations and also accepted staffing levels needed to rise. He didn't have to do this and I'd venture to suggest if a different candidate had won there'd have been no review and no desire to increase staffing levels. Looking in from the outside it seems to me that the assumptions underlying the new model were too aggressive and this has resulted in a fragile staffing situation that can't cope if overtime is not worked at high levels. I've not been directly affected by a station closure *but* I have decided not to travel at all in order to avoid them. I have that flexibility but oodles of people don't and are having their journeys mucked up.

The one issue where I would criticise the current Mayor is that he's not handled the strike at all well, had set himself up for a fall during the campaign and has given all the wrong signals to the unions that LU are likely to concede in order to avoid more grief for him as Mayor. That's just a daft place to get to when dealing with the tube unions - they can smell weakness at a 1,000 paces. Managing to get embroiled in the aftermath of your predecessor's failed policy is not a good place for Mr Khan but showing weakness sets up problems for the next 4 years over pay, terms and conditions and the deliver of any more efficiencies that LU have decided they need to make that affect staff.

All track circuits are remotely monitored on the Vic and flag up warnings when they are about to fail

I avoided the Vic on my journey home tonight, and instead ended my journey via the District at Sloane Square and walked from there..

As the District train passed through Victoria (c. 18:10?), an announcement that there were no southbound Vics gave the reason as a "broken rail".

It will be carnage if they don't as it's bad enough now when delays are still severe hours sometimes after the issue has been resolved.

For them to introduce 36tph running how man extra trains will be needed for service and how many run now isn't it 39 in the peaks?

I wonder if the delays in recovering the service are mainly due to Train Op's being out of position and/or needing relieving.

On Monday morning, as the incident was developing, I had to wait for the fourth Northern Line train before I could board.

A Victoria Line driver told me that both Monday and yesterday the issue was a broken rail with the one at Brixton requiring several attempts to fix it.

I don't know for sure how many trains are needed for 36TPH, but I reckon that it'll be about 41. Given that the original estimate which led to the 47 train order was that 43 trains would be needed for a 33TPH service, delivering 36TPH at all is pretty good.

When LU specified the JTC for VLU, it kept a performance margin for itself. Metronet in turn kept a small margin for itself as did Bombardier and Westinghouse (Invensys). All these margins were provided in case something went wrong with the design as the financial penalties for failure to deliver the performance were significant.

So, it might be reasonable to consider when more could be done with a couple of extra trains. I'm confident that good use can be found for them.....38TPH anyone?

Stretching my memory back I don't think there was ever an intention to run 36 tph. Upgrade requirements were expressed as a journey time capability target which could be met by a combination of factors with differing weights applied to different elements within the overall measure. The overall JTC though was composed in a way that stopped extremes being adopted - such as rolling stock that used enormous amounts of power to support very high acceleration / very rapid braking which would probably be very uncomfortable for standees or those a little wobbly on their feet. As 100&30 has said there were margins adopted by each party to the contract as risk allowances. Post PPP the JTC measure was not formally used as a "headline" for the upgrade project to achieve and "tph" re-emerged as the favoured headline to achieve. Being cynical this was probably because Directors couldn't understand JTC. By utilising the "margins" previously reserved by other parties and with the benefit of a broadly successful implementation I expect LU considered that more could be done with the infrastructure subject to spending the requisite money to ease constraints like crossover speeds etc. I also think there was a general reassessment as to what was needed from each upgrade to meet forecast demand levels. I think this is where the more general approach of pushing to 30tph and beyond emerged from - happy to be corrected by those who know for certain.

I'll be honest and say that I think pushing beyond 36tph is a bit risky. This is purely on the basis that you need everything to run like clockwork and extremely strict dwell time management. There must be a trade-off at some point between sheer throughput and the resilience of the service and also the ability to recover it when things go wrong. We also need to remember past incidents with stalled trains in tunnels and sub optimal decisions re evacuation from such trains. The Vic Line has had a lot of money spent on tunnel ventilation and other things to try to get tunnel temperatures down thus reducing the risk of extreme conditions in stalled trains. Nonetheless there is a need to balance things.

As I have bemoaned before there is no long term strategy for the tube network nor for tube station capacity. Forever pushing massive numbers of trains through platforms has an impact on the ability for stations to cope - as witnessed this past week when the Vic Line service fell over. We need to see a more coherent vision for the tube because what do you do when a 36 tph service is full and bursting. There are always more Crossrails but they are massively costly, take decades to develop and build (assuming no delays) and most likely only provide short term relief to the tube network that they parallel. We will know for certain come 2020/21 after a year or so of Crossrail operation how things are beginning to pan out - provided we haven't had World War 3 by then.