Delays, Control Rooms and Service Recovery

In find the central line twitter feed useful; it often gives more detail than the tfl status board. I think there was a broken down train at Mile End.

It seems that the status board returns to minor delays and then good service prematurely - probably for political reasons.

I arrived at Roding Valley travelling to Woodford and there were through trains arriving every 10 minutes - an excellent service for Roding Valley, but probably not reflective of a good service elsewhere, as the status board was suggesting...!

The Central is of course a more complicated line than some, exacerbated by the branches at either end (each of which may have its troubles) joining to form the single "pipe" under Central London, which must be one of the most intensively used bits of railway in the world.

Even then, though, it's still hard to make comparisons. I was formerly at a station with six different lines (four control rooms), and line recovery largely depended on what the incident was, where the incident was, and who the controller was.

Generally, yes: the Piccadilly was the worst to get back to normal and the Victoria the best, but as can be seen those are two very different lines with different characteristics and opportunities to get stock and crew back in book.

But that was by no means a given - some times the Vic would suffer for hours, and the Picc would be back together in no time at all. There are too many different factors at play to say which line is the best/the worst at putting a service back together.

The same is true of the Circle & Hammersmith and City lines, on which I'm now based. Sometimes we have things back together quickly (even from a major incident), other times we're struggling with a multitude of tiny problems. As I'm sure most will know, no two incidents are the same!

Ultimately, as long as trains are running with a reasonable frequency the passengers don't mind: it gets problematic for stock and crew, but under the circumstances I think the majority of controllers and control rooms do a very good job most of the time. There are always more incidents going on than anyone outside of that environment truly appreciates, and problems on one line can quickly transfer to another. Indeed, sometimes you're a train away from having it all back on book before something else happens...

Sometimes you get indications that suggest something is about to fail, but most of the time you don't. This is true not just of equipment, but also passengers. Every now and then you'll walk into work and just know that it's all going to go wrong - and it usually does! But we're an adaptable bunch, and most of the time we'll be on it as soon as something does go wrong.

Yes - absolutely! I should have made reference to the desk managers too. You've summed up well many of the challenges faced by them, and often recovery and solutions to problems are down to ideas suggested and built on by all involved parties.

When the system works, it works well - but when it falls down...!

Faulty trains at Holborn and Bethnal Green, severe delays this afternoon and may be into the evening rush hour.

The depot staff are currently working to rule and doing no overtime so they don't currently have enough staff to maintain the trains (due to being vastly understaffed and relied on overtime for a very long time). Expect more delays unless LU start to do something about it.

What about the origional two lines between Borough market junction and Metropolitan junction ?

Surely you didn't need a driver of an engineering train to tell you that....you have been at Leytonstone long enough to know for yourself 😉

Wasnt you an SA at Stratford on the Jubbly platforms? Though, at that time, the Jubbly controllers were worse at recovery than I ever remember the Central being 😉

Or, a wooden one not capable of any movement whatsoever, on account of being wooden 😉

When you're on stations you don't really notice if a specific train is running late or has been renumbered or is being short-turned, you just see how many minutes until the next one to wherever.

It isn't really, much like comparing different football teams in different leagues across many countries. In almost 20 yrs on the Central line I would say they're not too bad, they have their moments, some unnecessary rudeness from a select few of them, but I talk to most of them regularly both in an official and unofficial capacity. The only control room I've ever believed acted vengefully (and I say that cause a friend was working there and told me so) was the Jubillee line in the late 90s. Not recovering a service generally comes back to bite them on backside when they don't have drivers in the right position or on short meal relief, never really had an issue with this on Central line, but seemed almost a weekly occurrence on the Jubilee. Neasden were in combat and the drivers were the enemy, which I believe, goes a long way in explaining the very militant nature of the drivers on the line, they weren't always a militant crew though, but having 2 reps on the functional council gives them a bit of clout 😉

That is where engineering train drivers have the advantage over other drivers, they work several lines and they get to experience the various control rooms reaction to service suspensions etc.  If it weren't for the Leytonstone knife incident I'd never have been stuck up White City west siding with an engineering train next door chatting to the driver and I wouldn't have any idea that the Central Line was any worse than other lines for recovery after incidents.  Then again that was just his own opinion, maybe other engineering train drivers would disagree and rate the Central Line higher than second worst but we do seem to have trains still running late several hours after an incident has been sorted.

A new annoying trend is Wood Lane giving us "platforms and hold" and not telling us what's going on, especially as we are required to make PAs to the punters every two minutes.

"This train is being held due to an incident, as soon as someone tells me where it is and what's going on I'll tell you but for now your guess is as good as mine".