SSR Resignalling

Not a 4LM matter.
So that Whitechapel station can have it’s long closed Whitechapel Road entrance/exit reopened and new Durward Street access opened.
The temporary building on Court Street has now closed and the hoardings are being removed for reopening on Monday.

I think these have been posted in separate threads. The shut has to deal with Whitechapel reopening. Check the Crossrail Elizabeth Line delay thread.

No its not!

Crossrail/ Elizabeth line work at Whitechapel station ,the Original entrance on Whitechapel High Street , might reopen on Monday 23 August
Also work is taking place on the Overground route at Whitechapel.
Timetables changes from 12 September have been posted by Dstock7080, the section east of Stepney Green can’t have shorter running times until the ATO is completed, which may not take place until 2022.

SMA5 (Sloane Square to Fulham Broadway/Barons Court/Olympia/Paddington) is the next to go live and that is currently planned to switch on in November. Should the November milestone be missed, the back up plan for SMA5 go live is January 2022.

SMA6 (Stepney Green to Becontree) has a provisional go live planned for February 2022 and SMA7 (Becontree to Upminster) is provisionally planned to go live in May 2022.

It should be noted that none of these dates are confirmed and they are therefore subject to change.....

Technically, it hasn't been deemed adequate. Something is only deemed once it has been presented to a Deemster. The nearest Deemsters to London that I am aware of are on the Isle Of Man, where their position is similar to that of a judge.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deemster

Anyway, back on topic....

The north side of the Circle was heaving at times during the afternoon, not helped by the Northern being closed north of Moorgate. To be honest the whole thing was a bit of a mess - the S7 services were at times leaving people behind, Moorgate was busier than in traditional rush hour.

Information on the Met services left something to be desired too, conflicting information at Baker Street on stopping patterns. I took a train north which was up as semi-fast Amersham, CIS on the train was blank, no driver announcements, so a bit unclear where it was meant to be stopping.

What with the Northern Line being utter chaos at Moorgate I certainly didn’t feel today’s performance reflected credit on TFL. One really notices how information provision quality on stations has declined since Fit For The Future.

I know it’s tempting to reach for the rose-tinted spectacles, however LU has a distinctly second-rate atmosphere pervading it at the moment, a rather creaking-at-the-seams feel. I think this constant financial feeling of governance limbo is really starting to bite now. Let’s all hope this doesn’t lead to a repeat of the events of 1987, which is generally felt to be the result of the last time TFL was in a decline period.

If the Parsons Green sidings and Putney Bridge crossovers already have had its mechanism installed then it should be more swift. Another buffer is how the District line would have to amend their timetable again due to shorter running times. If they can make it right after Becontree to Upminster (SMA7) then it'd be much smoother in amending the timetable

It was a complete disaster just like most of London these days.

We have a new timetable on the District from 12th September. Well, when I say new; it's the just the current one tweaked here and there.

From the 12th September run times have apparently been "revised to reflect the faster run time offered by automatic train operation". To be honest, having skim read a few random trips here there throughout the traffic day, I don't really see much of a reduction. Maybe a minute or so between Tower Hill and Earls Court on some peak time trips but off peak looks no different. It'll be interesting to see how it works from 12th September but I'll be surprised if there's any dramatic change.

Speaking with my driver's hat on the District has always had a very generous timetable whilst I've been on it (17 years) but the difference in driving style between legacy and CBTC signalling really highlights just how generous the timetable actually is.

My view FWIW is because CBTC gives the driver a countdown timer in the cab its encouraging drivers to shut the doors and depart platforms much more quickly than was the case under legacy signalling. With experience a driver working on a legacy signalled railway can judge whether to waste a bit of time in a platform or get a move on in order to maintain the timetabled path. With the benefit of repeater signals and knowing how an area works, an experienced driver on the legacy railway can work out the best speed to travel through a particular area. The end result of all that experience is that you end up with a journey that likely appears to be more consistent in speed terms and faster than CBTC between stations. In reality the overall journey time is longer but you don't notice the extra dwell time the driver puts in at various platforms or that the driver controlled the speed between stations in a way that CBTC doesn't.

With CBTC its go go go straight out of the traps after its encouraged the driver to get the doors shut and press the go buttons. All that achieves is train arriving at the next station earlier than it would have done. Now the train is running early and so CBTC ends up having to slow itself down. The end result is the appearance that CBTC is slower than drivers under legacy signalling.

It seems that things are being allowed to drift.... instead of proactively managed.

With proper management advantage would be taken of the quicker / shorter journey durations that are possible with CBTC.

That's a good question. At least when SMA 5 goes live there is a chance for a permanent and faster Circle line journey.

This is an interesting question to consider. One big benefit of ATO is it reduces the problem of one slow driver holding everything up, and it also reduces the number of delays caused by operational incidents. However both of these issues can be reduced by better training, though probably not to the same extent as ATO.

Beyond that there’s a benefit from centralised control, which of course could have been achieved with the old signalling, and there are features of the system which are certainly useful. But the flip side is the Thales system performs badly during disruption, though to be fair disruption happens less as its reliability is generally fairly strong. But given how much the SSR is prone to disruption caused by external events, this will no doubt be an issue long in to the future.

By the same token resignalling SSR to conventional signalling wouldn’t have been perfect either, as no doubt there would have been some challenges matching current throughputs and meeting all current signalling design requirements.

ATO is ALWAYS going to deliver a more consistent and predictable service than manual driving. All trains are driven the same and up to the maximum the infrastructure will allow. This leads to the time taken over flat junctions to be minimised whilst always observing the speed restriction. The existence of the flat junctions and that slightly lower nominal brake rates are used on SSR compared with the Victoria line means that the top capacity has always been lower for SSR at 32TPH compared with 36TPH on the Victoria line. What observers are seeing right now are, in all probability, caused by the following:

1) Trains running to the existing timetable will feel like they're being held up. Loading new timetables will speed up the trains, provided the timetables take account of the higher performance available from the trains when in ATO
2) Despite extensive modelling, there are always tweaks to be made based on observations in service. This might mean speeds need to be tweaked, that the automatic speed controller (part of the ATO) might need some adjustment to respond better to how the train behaves, and
3) Staff in the controller room will still be learning their craft as they have control over acceleration and braking rates to help with adhesion management.