Poor reliability

You’d have thought that the signalling would have been designed to cope though.

There is too much vested political interest in the Night Tube now to even think about remitting it, many in the industry would rather see an extension to late night services as more economically viable than running through but it's not transport planners who have the final say it's usually a politician whom has an electorate to win over not bothering with the realities of running an ageing transport network.

1992 stock certainly are showing their technological wrinkles, nothing begins to age quicker than yesterdays vision of the future and those innovating features that bore out from all those trials and mock ups are starting to look very ostracised in the current mantra of standardisation that LU want to pursue with their fleet replacements.

The problem with the trains started before Night Tube, they started in September 2013 when WTT67 increased the frequency in the evenings and at weekends. If you're running 24tph until 22:00 M-F then the train maintainers have to check more trains in a smaller time space, they don't have time to deal with everything so trains go into service the next morning with minor faults which sometimes develop into major faults while they are out on the road. In addition the depots don't have enough staff so they are completely reliant on overtime, when the depot staff had an overtime ban in 2015 the number of cancelled trains was even worse than it is now.

Back in December 2015 when we had the knife attack at Leytonstone I was stuck up White City West Siding next to an engineering train sat at the signal on the Eastbound.  I got talking to the driver who it turned out had experience of working on all the other lines (apart from the W&C) so I asked him if other control rooms were as slow to recover the service as Wood Lane and in his opinion only the Piccadilly Line was worse than the Central.  For some reason some controllers at Wood Lane seems averse to short tripping, reduced turnaround time means there's very little "wiggle room" in the timetable so sometimes we're running late until the close of traffic.

On top of that we're still short of drivers, they even sent back a few of the ones that were displaced to Earl's Court last year because management said we had too many.

Given the financial situation at TfL I don't predict that the staffing problems are going to be addressed but rather than cutting Night Tube (which actually has been far more popular than TfL predicted) we should reduce evening and weekend working to WTT66 levels as we're running far more trains than passenger numbers require.  Sadly management seem obsessed with the idea that more trains on the timetable means a better service - even if we don't have the trains or drivers available.

Agreed, there are times when Wood Lane seems paralysed, hoping that the problem is resolved quickly and they can carry on without messing up the timetable too much. A long time ago when we had plenty of staff and management would take us off for the occasional pep talks I was taken as part of a group to visit Wood Lane. When one of the controllers boasted that they were the best Control Room on the Combine it was rather hard to keep a straight face.

That being said some are quite good so when you hear certain voices over the radio you know that someone competent is in charge.

We had a total mess today. A one under at Bethnal Green eastbound at 11:56, I was on the train before it so the last eastbound train before they suspended service eastbound (but not westbound) Liverpool Street to Leytonstone. I left Leytonstone on the inner rail at 12:03, the next departure from Leytonstone on the inner wasn't until 12:35, 32 minutes without a single train on the loop. I've been told that there was no train from Hainault to Woodford for over an hour but I've not checked it.

When I finished my meal break at White City my train was running an hour late but then they renumbered it and I had to sit around watching the football then get a train out of White City sidings to be on time for my westbound to West Ruislip. When I finally got to Leytonstone I was 15 minutes late, five and a half hours after they'd resumed service.

Wood Lane are beyond useless

Are there any maps showing where cross-overs are on the Underground? Google Satellite view is just about useable to see point-work for the above-ground sections... I have an anorak's rail atlas showing such features, but it's only for "British Rail" lines.

I definitely think turning trains short is a potentially very useful tactic - that's why they do it! Surely that's particularly true on the tube with its shorter journeys in and out of the centre of London. Clearly turning an Epping train short at Loughton isn't like terminating the Edinburgh to London King's Cross short of the city!

But I do think there are many things to consider and probably there are different philosophies which all have strengths and weaknesses. I'm not sure there's an obvious right answer as to whose philosophy is best.

Clearly getting everything back on time as quickly as possible by strategically short-tripping trains, extending some, renumbering some, taking some out of service, putting some extra back in, all that kind of thing, is what Wood Lane is there for.

But, there's no doubt that there are many disadvantages to terminating trains early. Obviously you can only do that with trains being driven by people who aren't due off for a while. Clearly you can't send the person who's due off at Hainault in half an hour back to Ealing Broadway at Liverpool Street!

Obviously short-tripping trains in the centre has plenty of problems. It's likely that a whole train load of people is gonna be disgorged onto a platform that's already probably pretty busy because of the delays, which is gonna create problems on stations and will also slow following trains down as they will have to attempt to clear this backlog.

Turning the train itself will be a problem. If it has to go into a siding, carriages will need checking. And then there's the matter of getting it in and out of the siding without holding up other trains too much as the moves are made. If, instead, the train reverses off a platform over a crossover, the driver will have to pick their way through the crowds and the move can delay trains in both directions. It also creates passenger confusion. You've just offloaded an entire trainload of people wanting to go - say - eastbound onto an already-busy eastbound platform, and now the train in the platform is going west. This isn't always pretty.

If you short-trip a train further out, you can get different problems. For starters, on the Central particularly, the plum reversing points, like Newbury Park, Loughton, White City and Northolt, are probably already taken by booked services. Then you don't wanna be one of the poor beggars who've been on their - say - Epping train for over an hour and a half, who finally think they're on the way home, only to be booted off at Debden where they're gonna be for another half an hour.

None of which is to say that there aren't wrong ways to run a service. We are lucky to have with us here experienced railway professionals who've seen how the different philosophies play out and can attest to what works well on the ground and what doesn't. I don't wish to cast any doubt on aslefshrugged's analysis, I merely think there're a lot of considerations and there's probably more than one valid approach to running a good service.

A good post tut. However, there has been a recent trend to do nothing but hold trains in platfroms or take ages to make a decision either way. When they had the trespasser at Marble Arch, the line was advertised as only being suspended from Liverpool Street to White City. However, trains were not being turned there, so effectively the whole line sat down for 40 minutes, which is not good enough.

As if Wood Lane would bother to tell station staff what was going on!

They barely communicate with the drivers, we'll be sat there for ages, if we try to call for info Wood Lane won't answer then the signal clears without any warning and off we go.

To Wood Lane the trains are just dots on a monitor and passengers only show up as "loading" numbers on trains.  Perhaps they need something like "Mini Metro" where the passengers are shown as little circles, squares or triangles with the stations getting increasingly crowded until one gets too full and the screen flashes "game over".

Signal failure at Debden, no service Epping to Loughton, delays between Loughton and Leytonstone according to Central Line Twitter

Does the term "Signal Failure" include point/switch failure as well? I never hear the latter, so wonder whether the Signal Failure "euphemism" is always used as it doesn't sound so scary...

They have a new service delay message now. "Delays on the central line while we fix a signal failure at ...."
Even if nothing is being done, it gives the impression to passengers that its in the process of being repaired.

We had a points failure at Ealing Broadway last night, when I got there just after 8:30pm only Plat.6 was in use. As I mentioned before there's very little wiggle room in WTT 69, we don't get much turnaround time even after the evening peak so by the time I'd waited for the train on Plat 6 to leave, pulled in and changed ends I was already running late.

Add Newbury Park and Northolt reversers in the evening to that list.

It seems very much as if the sole consideration of both WTT 67 and WTT 69 was squeeze as many trains in as they possibly could with no thought as to whether passenger numbers needed that many trains, whether the trains were up to it, whether there was enough staff to cover it or how the service would be affected by shut downs.