Farce of a rail replacement service

Traffic in London was horrendous yesterday. It was Mothering Sunday and the whole world and its dog seemed to be on the road.

Whilst I wasn't party to what was happening yesterday, I have controlled rail replacements in the past and sometimes they go badly wrong; probably not under-bussed but purely the subject of bad traffic. Possibly even the standby buses were used. That the controllers don't have a clue is probably; when I done that work we never knew where the buses were as we weren't given (and didn't have) the technology then. I doubt if mobile controllers would have that either; a lot may be free-lance, some employees of whoever has the contract.

LUL specify the number of buses in service, the headways and the number of standby buses.

Your comment says it took an hour from Hammersmith to Acton Town; that shows how bad the traffic must have been. Personally I'm sorry you've been delayed.

I've done Heathrow-Ealing Common/Northfields and the big DR closures, Embankment-South Ken and the Wimbledon line. On each of those we actually ran out of buses at times due to traffic delays, and that was with over 60 buses doing the rounds!

I have found the biggest problem with replacement buses lately is the lack of competent, informed and authorised to give out orders, personell from the bus companies. A few closures ago there was a 40 minute gap in the bus service to Barnet (not bad compared to the usual train every 4 minutes), the assistant employed to give out information was useless and could not instruct drivers to change from terminating at Finchley to going through to Barnet. All it needed to be resolved was an inspector (who eventually showed up) to instruct a driver to change his destination - although his subsequent attitude to passengers who were asked to get off due to overcrowding (caused by the lack of buses) was sub-optimal.

Another problem is that London runs out of buses every weekend, hence the need to sub-contract to operators from outside the area. when I ran my bus company in Mitcham, we covered the whole of the south east; draw a line fro London to Margate, round the coast to Southampton, back up to Reading, High Wycombe, Northampton, Peterborough, Kings Lynn, Colchester, Southend and back to London plus most of the underground..it's quite a big area to cover and I've personally done them all. during the 2000 floods some of us were away from base over a week covering the south coast.

Drivers too come from all over and rarely have enough time to do any form of route learning, controllers come from literally all over the country. Nobody can know every local bus route everywhere.

Don't keep knocking the rail replacement buses.

Part two

Due to the nature of this job, I am going to be careful so as not tread on anyone’s toes. Understandably there’s some degree of focus on this one. So if I talk in round terms hopefully you will understand why.

This weekend there were four contractors involved. Service A (Hammersmith – Ealing Broadway) was with Arriva London, Tower Transit had service B which ran Hammersmith – Gunnersbury/Richmond, Metroline were doing service C which was the fast service between Hammersmith & Acton Town. Lastly we had a smaller job (service D) running between Ealing Common & Northfields. Excluding standby buses this job needed roughly 50 buses at its peak.

From previous experience, this area is very challenging to say the least. You have a busy gyratory at Hammersmith and an unpredictable roundabout at Gunnersbury. And as others have pointed out there’s roadwork’s and other issues in the area which can all conspire to put a pretty big spanner in the works.

Perhaps best start with the planning – In general terms LUL & London Buses produce the timetables of which bus operators are required to tender against. The running times are created using a mix of different factors. Firstly long before the closure is tendered, the route is surveyed using the type of bus intended. This will note any difficult turns, low structures, parking restrictions needed and so on. At the same time the running times are analysed. Secondly TfL will compare those times with known running times on parallel bus services and then mix that in with experience of other closures. Thus we end up with a variety of running times intended to suit the different times of the traffic day. Operators then tender in good faith on this basis.

The problem is that you can trial run the odd bus here and there, but you cannot replicate what happens when you drop another 50 buses on to an already overcrowded road network. Furthermore until the actual day you will have little or no idea how long it would take to load & unload each bus. Of course with Piccadilly line closures you have the addition of luggage to consider. And most people want to stay with their luggage, so unless you handle the loading carefully, a double decker bus could end up losing half its capacity as customers block the lower deck isles and refuse to risk dragging their luggage up the staircase.

Furthermore as we have found in the past, the Piccadilly line has some very unusual peak flows. It’s can be manic at start and finish of the day and oddly quiet at other times. Obviously the loadings are dictated by arrivals and departures of flights at Heathrow, and this can vary week on week.

So if we go back to the planning. As we all know LUL will try to encourage customers to use alternative routes. Occasionally this may seem illogical, but its better to keep passengers on the network for as long as possible, and keep the bus trip as short as possible. This means that LUL will look to parallel lines when planning services. Theres a few of these, but for example the Bakerloo is fairly close to the Met & Jubilee at Wembley, the Centrals stations at Stratford & Newbury Park are very good for east end District closures. And in this case Ealing Broadway is ideal for the Piccadilly Line at Northfields.

LUL will also hope that some people will use other mainline and local buses, or simply not travel in that area at all. So a calculation is made on the basis that there will be some loss of footfall. That’s all very good assuming customers listen to (or understand) that message. If you put on a “fast bus” service, customers will flock to that as they will incorrectly assume this is better than the alternatives being offered. When that happens we experience overloading.

However as we have seen, with multiple closures customers do start to try alternatives. And as time grinds by, the numbers using the buses diminish. We experienced this on the Central line when I worked there as a Manager in the mid 90’s. The first weekend we ran buses between Leytonstone & Bethnal Green the service was heavily overloaded, which prompted the operator (at that time Capital Citybus) to approach me for funding for extra buses. However by week 17 we could have ran half the service. When we restarted the trains, the numbers of passengers had fallen so dramatically, our Sundays on the east of the Central looked more like Boxing Day. The same happened on the Jubilee line.  So there is a seismic shift as time goes on, its just very difficult to get it to work on the “one weekend wonders”.

However bussing everyone is not normally an option. And there are many good reasons for this. Firstly London is a very compact place. Stand & stop space is very limited. In Central London between the Circle line we stopped doing rail replacements in this part of the world years ago. Part of this was because the bus network has capacity for the extra passengers, and secondly we clog up busy streets with our railway replacement buses. I remember doing one Marble Arch – White City job in the mid 90s where the crowd at Marble Arch became so large they spilled out into the road and we lost one of the two carriageways on the approach to Marble Arch roundabout. This meant our buses were loading in lane 2, and while doing so nothing could get round us. Thus Oxford Street and Baker Street came to a halt. It’s not something we can get away with these days.

Having seen a number of pictures from last weekends operations, I can confirm that Metroline had their best staff on it. One of their regulators was a very experienced chap with many years of bus scheduling experience. However despite this the job still fell over. This says to me that the fault (if there is any) does not lay with any one particular organisation. We just have to get together and learn from it (and hope the passengers have too!) and move on to the next one.

Hi Dean,

Many thanks for your comprehensive reply!

I had noticed that the railway replacement on the Barnet branch appears to be yourselves and Metroline on a roughly 50/50 basis. As an aside, some time ago they ran a replacement service from Archway to Finchley and then a separate service from Arnos to Barnet - no use if you wish to travel the length of the line, although I suppose they would wish you to catch a service 263 bus.



I think this is/was the main problem - the attendant on the street presumably has no control, although I would assume they have a phone number or similar to call a control room if there are problems.



Aha - hopefully this will improve matters! Granted it's probably difficult to "work blind" with a stand remote from the stop. Presumably with two supervisors, the one at the station can radio or phone through to the one up top to dispatch another bus, or re-form one.



I didn't realise that this happened - though I know that the likes of Metroline and FirstBus will drag in vehicles from other depots, I didn't realise that operators sub-contracted to each other. In a way it's more frustrating when Metroline cock up - they have the benefit of a depot at Archway for layovers/changeovers etc. I suppose that they wouldn't use a plug bus from their "stage carriage" operations on a replacement service, though. I have also experienced problems with vehicles which are either not mechanically fit, or simply not appropriate for long-distance work, which are chugging along at 20-30mph on an empty dual carriageway! Not from your company I have to say - although I was nearly thrown from my seat by a Volvo with an extremely iffy gearbox!



Ironically, this has helped before - where a driver has pointed out that he was due his tea break and it was pointless for him to run empty up to Barnet from Finchley, when he could do so in service.

I think the main problems experienced (other than traffic which is outwith anyone's control) are with supervision, or lack thereof, but it's good to hear that that has been sorted. Many thanks for your considered and comprehensive reply!

A most excellent and very comprehensive explanation of the finer points of Rail Replacement Bus Services from Dean.

It occurs to me that parts of the capital get closed for the marathon, trooping of the colour and similar events throughout the year.

I would've thought that when planning rail replacement services for major railway projects at weekends, consideration would be given by TfL to closing any and all necessary routes to all but public transport and emergency services and similarly suspending parking along those routes.