Passengers leave NR train at Lewisham

I have always found this to be a meaningless request.  I for one do not travel for fun! I travel to and from work and like many people I work in the Gig economy so no work no pay.

In one of the posts above, this comment was made
“I still suspect too many people on that train didn't need to be there or at work in the first place, but just didn't pay attention to warnings about not travelling unless you had to. Unless you are in the essential services, can't you understand the sun isn't going to fall out of the sky if you can't make it in for a couple of days?”
A few thoughts on that.
First thought - and the lesser point - Hospitals. Right beside London Bridge is Guys, a major hospital. Some of those on the trains may well have been NHS staff, and it is critical that they can get to/from work.
Additionally, Guys is a cancer centre. Many patients will be on out-patient visits for radio or chemotherapy treatment. It’s easy for us to say “skip the session” but for some patients missing a session can have serious health implications. I would also suggest that many patients will be worried about getting an appointment rescheduled, given the huge pressure on all our hospitals. In future, it might be helpful for hospitals to make a statement (facebook/twitter/whatever) to say “don’t come to hospital today and we guarantee you’ll get a new appointment within x days”. (Sounds good - wonder if hospitals have any slack in the system to be able to do that….)
That said, I don’t suggest that traffic to / from Guys was the majority of passengers - far from it.

Second point. The City
The main source of traffic on those trains will have been City workers. Was it really necessary for everyone who’d gone to work that day to actually go to work? Surely everything can be done remotely these days? I’m sure a fair few went in when they could have worked remotely - and that needs to be discouraged.
But for some staff - remote working is not an option. Retail banks have an obligation to open their doors on every working day - they don’t have the option to say “we’re not opening today”.
That said, most workers in the City are not in retail banking - they’re in commercial and investment banking. The financial sums moved each day in the City are eye watering - the settlement of a single derivatives transaction may require billions to be moved between accounts. Yes - I said billions. There are all sorts of security reasons why settlement of such high value transactions is not authorised by remote working. Treasury Operations teams use networks that are not connected to the internet - they use private networks - for which remote access is never permitted. Some banks use second stage authentication that requires a physical presence. Therefore, if it’s not a Bank Holiday - some staff need to be at the office. Failure to settle on the agreed date often has significant and legal penalties. Due to the way a lot of options transactions are written, Friday is often an intensely busy day for Settlement Teams - settlement transaction volumes and values are way higher than other working days.

Third point - alluded to in a point above - gig workers
Those in a gig contract - don’t show up - don’t get paid. That puts a huge pressure on many people to go to work even though the advice is “don’t travel unless vital”. For many, not getting paid turns it into a “vital” event.

So can nothing be done differently?
Well yes, a couple of thoughts on that.
Firstly. Bank Holidays. Those of us old enough to remember the “Great Storm” of 1987 may recall that that day was declared an emergency Bank Holiday. The impact of that was to automatically move the settlement date of transactions due to settle to the next working day, thus avoiding legal penalties for failure to settle. On the Great Storm day, it was after 1000 before the Bank Holiday was declared, only after it had become clear to the Bank of England and the Heads of the Banks that probably only about 15% of staff had managed to get to work. (Irrelevant anecdotal - I commuted by DLR in those days, and the DLR managed to operate normally - so I was one of the only people at my workplace to actually get in at the usual time....)
Given that the Met Office gave clear, accurate and frequent warnings in advance of this “beast from the east”, there was ample time for a Bank Holiday to be declared. (The Bank Holiday needs to be declared for legal reasons in terms of the way many high value transactions are contracted). That would have enabled Bank management to instruct staff not to come to work.
Secondly. Learn from the New York procedures. I know that the north east coast of the US gets more extreme weather than we do, and therefore they spend more money on dealing with snow than we can justify. Nevertheless, I suggest there are some ideas to adopt. I was working in New York a few years ago when 23inches of snow fell in less than 24 hours. Yes, 23 inches. New York city (I presume the Mayor, not totally clear who decides) declared a “snow emergency” when the heavy snow forecast was confirmed. The effects of declaring a “snow emergency”?. (1) All vehicles have to be removed from designated “snow routes”, so that ploughs (or plows as they say over there) are able to operate freely once the snow starts. (2) From a certain time, once the snow has started, no vehicles are allowed to drive, unless authorised. Typically only emergency vehicles and snow clearance trucks are authorised to drive. In New York, all garbage trucks are fitted with plows/ploughs, and that hugely increase the number of available snow clearance vehicles. (Not a chance of London adopting that with our fragmented and outsourced services). Failure to comply with snow emergency rules results in a huge fine, I think about USD1,000. (3) The MTA stopped train service from a time - published hours in advance so that travellers don't get caught out. Instead of storing trains in open air depots (as they normally do), they store the trains in the subway tunnels under Manhattan. I suspect the experts on this forum will remind us that London can’t do that, with the narrow gauge of most of our tunnels. But something to think of for Crossrail, which has much bigger tunnels plus walkways?
This procedure works. A fall of 23 inches of snow in a city is a huge problem, yet New York was operating normally less than 24 hours after the snow stopped. The subway running on most lines, buses operating within Manhattan, traffic able to operate on major routes. Another helpful factor for New York is that the population density of Manhattan is far greater than central London - many workers can (if they really have to) put on winter boots and walk to work. That is harder for London to replicate...

Does the New York experience translate to London? The issue in the UK has to be political - can anyone make the equivalent “snow day” process happen? Does the Mayor of London have the legal power to declare the London equivalent of a “snow emergency”. I suspect not….

@iskanddweller

It was I who posted re essential services and I took it as read everybody else would have included hospitals in that category-sorry I wasn't clearer on that.

There are lessons to learn from New York in that a master plan for the next time it happens could be formulated, doesn't matter if it's one or ten years to the next time, because it's easy to assimilate what needs to be done from what was missing this time. I remember Boris cancelled every bus in London when a sudden snowfall hit, rightly or wrongly, so the power to implement was & presumably still is there.

On another note re this train, the point superteacher professed we were missing strikes me to've been just how uncomfortably and possibly dangerously that train was loaded. As a matter of interest, has anyone else endured that before, outside of the Tube?

And if the answer is, every blasted night on the 17:49, as far as East Croydon anyway, then something does need to be done on a default option.

The ignorant question from me - as I am interested observer rather than being in the industry.
We've seen that the emergency services invoke a "gold command" system when there is a major incident. Does the transport industry (or any part of it) have any equivalent? If yes, was it invoked during the Lewisham incident?

The use of the 'Gold command' setup is regularly carried out on the railways - typically used due to a fatality causing chaos.

I think it has been readily established that resources on the day the Lewisham incident were stretched beyond breaking point, and that those 'in charge' were having a hard time - its all very well having a 'Gold Command' but if there simply are not enough resources to carry out their instructions  or the situation on the ground changes before certain actions can be carried out, it makes very little difference what the command structure is called.

People should also remember the incident is under investigation by the Rail Accident Investigation Board, whose report will undoubtedly investigate matters such as the chain of command in detail. Until that report gets released it must be remembered that many of those saying X, Y and Z should have been done are engaging in speculation (however well informed they might be) which could well turn out to be compete nonsense.

I think this hits the nail on the head.

Snow is one of those situations where the railway simply doesn't have enough resources on the ground, and you can add to this that what resources do exist will have mobility issues getting to an incident. Then you have the issue that no matter how many staff one plans to be on duty, reality will be different simply because a proportion of staff probably won't be able to get in.

One can have all the command structures in the world and a comprehensive rule book full of procedures saying what should happen, but it all comes to nothing if there aren't the right staff available on the ground in the right place at the right time with the right training and experience, whether they're wearing a silver tabard or not makes not much difference.

There's only so much mitigation which can be put in place for this, short of having a ridiculous level of staff rostered at all times, which for most days would be overkill. One partial solution is of course to try to get extra staff in on overtime, and perhaps key staff could be offered the option of being put up in hotels close to where they are needed. Personally I'd also prefer to see station staff on the mainline trained to deal with a greater range of operational scenarios, but who pays for this, and how do we square up the issue that station staff work for the TOC who is not the infrastructure owner/provider?

In essence, whilst more could be done, unfortunately during snow these sorts of things are probably inevitable. People should be careful what they wish for, as one way to avoid this scale of incident is to close the railway down completely during snow.

The big problem with South Eastern is that the were promulgating false information on the 'live departures' board.

It made it look as if the restricted service was running well.

If trains that are (normally) formed from stock that is completing a ~2 hour journey are described as 'on time', it is reasonable to assume that they are running and in their expected positions.

This is what SE did for virtually all of Friday morning. Only when you got to Victoria and saw no trains at all on platforms 1-8, and found the information screen did you, after it had displayed up to three other pages, get the information that the conductor rails were iced up and nothing was running south of Swanley.