Marylebone closed - expect chaos on the Met!

I wonder if Chiltern can temporarily run a few more trains to Paddington on the back of their existing running rights with the daily 'Parliamentary' from W Ruislip. 
    

Would there be capacity at Baker Street?
Especially as the Met trains will be full of displaced Chiltern passengers any extra disruption caused would not be appreciated

Perhaps the wrong place to ask - but what does CALL mean in the emergency timetable? It's used in place of an actual time for some stops.

I'm guessing it means something like "The train will call here, but with no exact timing schedule - so get there early" - but wouldn't that be a bit of an unusual thing to be presenting to passengers? I can understand obviously that this has been put together quickly, just finding it a little odd. Are these stops that would not be made by the 'equivalent' trains from the standard timetable?

Did'nt mean to post twice,-- am expecting a comment from maxym!

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It might help flexibility if gauge trials were undertaken, despite only four platforms, heavily-used, being available. I'm a great believer in quick and effective emergency working.

Here in the Durham coalfield, 'bustitution' is the first and final answer to all interruptions apart from those to London-Newcastle expresses. It seems no-one even knows how to set up single-line working any more.

A poor state of affairs, considering the dismal service offered in the first place; we tend to measure in 'hours between trains' rather than 'tph'.

Depending on the font size you use, it may well be as long as the distance between Harrow-OT-Hill and Baker street

But seriously, I suspect that route knowledge might be a problem - would there be sufficient T/Ops available to pilot the Chiltern drivers through to baker street, as well as the obvious things such as clearances, general lack of space at Baker street (isn't it the case that stepping back is already in use, with a fairly high platform occupation rate?), and all sorts of other problems, would a 168 sat in the tunnels between Finchley Road and Baker street kick out enough fumes to trigger something bad &c.

I think that there are ways of hand signalling trains through an area, but when you are trying to investigate the issue, as well as repairing it, having to stop every so often to let a train through wouldn't be very beneficial. In this case, it was better to just abandon the service and let the repair men do their thing, rather than running a skeleton service

Now that Chiltern say they are back to normal (save for some short-formed trains, etc), did anyone use the Met on Sunday and Monday? Was it really "chaos" (at Harrow?) and I guess West Ruislip was busier than normal too, not helped by the Sunday afternoon shut-down west of Marble Arch for an hour-plus because of arcing on the track at White City.

In the 70's and 80's, the Northern line had single line running between Hampstead and Golders Green and between Totteridge and High Barnet during two extended periods of engineering work, and still kept the passenger service running, albeit at a reduced frequency. As Roy said in his post, you really can't imagine that happening now, or even be allowed to!

The system has become a lot less flexible than it once was. I'm thinking of such as examples as when Bakerloo trains ran into Baker Street met, C stock getting commandeered to run on the Met main line and so on.

I'm sure I've said it before in this place but when I joined LT in the 1970s it was a cardinal sin to have escalators out of service, for last train connections not to be held and for engineering work to unnecessarily delay or prevent the operation of train services. These days no-one cares about any of that and no-one is held responsible for it as they would've been all those years ago. I worked on the Northern resignalling when it was single line working for the removal of blue asbestos back in 1978 (IIRC), back then engineering was very much 'can do' regardless of many circumstances that will prevent it today. We had to keep trains running throughout the resignalling work for months as we installed new cable brackets and air main night in night out and then running in thousands of metres of new lead covered cables. The blue asbestos discovery happened in the middle of the resignalling work and had to be catered for PDQ. The temporary single line working signalling was installed very quickly so the external asbestos removal team could get to work, as I recall they took quite a few weeks to complete the task.
In those days signal problems were not a reason to hold up traffic without good reason, that went for accidents too. Back then we used to finish installation work at around 0415 and begin tidying up, making sure nothing was left out of gauge in the tunnels and all rubbish was cleared back to the platforms for storage. The cables used to hang off the air main on balata straps, the air main secured to the tunnel segments via pipe clips. One morning after a nights work and while loading up the trolley in the tunnel there was a sudden 'twang' as a pipe clip gave way under the weight of cables tied to it, that stressed the next pipe clip which also gave way and began a chain reaction ripping the air main and cabling from the tunnel segments for a hundred metres or more and dropping it onto the track. The only thing that stopped the wave of destruction was the next signal location as the bundle was arrested by a line of location relay cases and track transformer. Luckily there were about 40 staff on site as we had been working in all four tunnels out of Chalk Farm, fortunately we also had a ready stock of 4 way brackets and air main stored in the old lift shaft at Chalk Farm where we kept our track trolleys and tool bins for the job. We were able to install new brackets and air main and lift the cables into the brackets as we went temporarily repairing the damage and making good for traffic with no appreciable delay to service although ISTR that we held up the first train for about 15 minutes. It is the kind of incident that I have no doubt would cause major disruption nowadays. We did many things in those days that simply aren't done today.