Coronavirus Implications For London's Transport

Are the points really that bad as to need a special plan when the temperature reaches 23C?

Not just NHS staff

The full list from the GOV.UK website

Health and social care

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Education and childcare

This includes childcare, support and teaching staff, social workers and those specialist education professionals who must remain active during the COVID-19 response to deliver this approach.


Key public services

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Food and other necessary goods

This includes those involved in food production, processing, distribution, sale and delivery, as well as those essential to the provision of other key goods (for example hygienic and veterinary medicines).


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Transport

This includes those who will keep the air, water, road and rail passenger and freight transport modes operating during the COVID-19 response, including those working on transport systems through which supply chains pass.


Utilities, communication and financial services

This includes staff needed for essential financial services provision (including but not limited to workers in banks, building societies and financial market infrastructure), the oil, gas, electricity and water sectors (including sewerage), information technology and data infrastructure sector and primary industry supplies to continue during the COVID-19 response, as well as key staff working in the civil nuclear, chemicals, telecommunications (including but not limited to network operations, field engineering, call centre staff, IT and data infrastructure, 999 and 111 critical services), postal services and delivery, payments providers and waste disposal sectors.

That's a lot of people

Its basically not moving the points at Harrow North Junction as the heat metal expands and binds everything up as the tolerances are quite tight.

Before someone says why not do this on all points well the ones on the junction are a one of design to fit the needs of that site. Some spares are not available or need to be made specifically for those points.

If they were to be used in the heat amd fail it takes a age for protection to be set up whilst technical staff go to site. If they made an adjustment today in the heat they would need adjusting again tonight as it would of cooled down, its a cycle that doesnt stop.

T/Op's aren't exactly working normally. On our line at Cockfosters, we are just doing one trip to Heathrow and back. I'm booking on at 21:40 tomorrow for a 22:15 pickup.

I am a full time T/Op, well actually an I/Op :-)

On my line there’s definitely a hint of some ER issues starting to develop.

For starters, it’s getting quite conspicuous that some drivers are well aware of their current value. So there have been people taking well longer on turnarounds (leading to bunching of the service), and some turning up late and saying “so what?” to the duty manager. It possibly doesn’t help that a special service can cause a situation where at times there’s quite a lot of people sitting around in the messroom. Likewise there can be an imbalance between what crews will do from depot to depot - for example on the Northern Golders Green is doing a lot of work, whereas the other depots are doing less.

Unfortunately no one is really happy at the moment, so things which in the grand scheme of things are fairly minor are playing on minds. It really doesn’t help when people look out the window and see what’s going on outside. Let’s just say lockdown appeared non-existent in parts of London yesterday.

There’s also been complaints of bunching on some lines. I can only speak for the Northern however the TBTC’s balanced headway function doesn’t appear to be working as designed, this being the first time it’s been used in anger. Lots of manual regulating from service control required to stop gaps opening up.

I’m not sure how many of the current control systems in use actually allow headways to be automatically regulated. TBTC does, but as I say it’s not working well in practice - there is a theory that this might be partly due to the number of closed stations and shorter-than-normal dwell times due to low passenger numbers messing up the headway calculations, but control staff have tried different things to compensate for these factors and it’s made no difference. It also doesn’t help that some drivers are taking considerably longer to complete a rounder than others, with no timetable there’s no padding so these variations show up considerably.

The Northern ended up with an imbalance yesterday morning with too many trains down the south end of the line and not enough at the north. A load of regulation was done, but this did then result in some trains taking twice the normal time to get from Kennington to Morden. A driver called up to complain that “why am I being regulated when there’s no one on my train?”. Can’t please everyone all the time! ;-)

On the District, Upminster (with a little bit of help from Barking) are covering the bulk of the line with Upminster to Olympia services. The west end now seem to be sending all their services to High Street Kensington. Dunno whether that's in response to available drivers, low passenger numbers in the central area or some other reason but the west end going round at High Street started on Thursday.

As far as Upminster goes, social distancing is very much in force - only two allowed in the book on point at any one time and all other rooms in the building have strict limits on numbers with tables and chairs suitably positioned to enable the minimum two metre gaps.

We still follow our rota in terms of giving us some basis for working hours but we now ring in advance to confirm our actual book on time. Book on time is 15 minutes before departure from Upminster (and we're expected to stick to that - no coming in early).

It obviously depends on whether you originally have an 8 hour duty or a shorter "snip turn" but you'll be told when ringing in whether you've got two trains (with a meal break in between) or just the one train. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't.

It works similarly if you're spare - you may already have a train allocated or you may actually be spare. I'm spare today and such is the nature of coverage today that I've been told to go in later than my official book on time. The idea here is to limit the amount of people in the building at any one time whenever possible.

So from the point of view of the east end of the District, its all working swimmingly. The only fly in the ointment is the numbers of passengers we're carrying in the area between Dagenham Heathway and Mile End.

Sort of. It’s one of those situation where you can’t really win. No doubt there were *some* passengers on those trains. Yesterday was very quiet, no doubt being Good Friday - not that many of us have even noticed it’s Easter!

With hindsight, what should have perhaps happened is a couple of trains should have been reversed somewhere like Moorgate or Euston to address the imbalance. However there is a slight reluctance by some control staff to use some of the emergency reversing points at the moment for a number of reasons. And of course this assumes the crewing situation at the time would allow it.

Also bear in mind the TBTC lines have tended to shift over time to a method of working where the signallers make quite a lot of the decisions (the Northern previously tended to work more on that basis than some other lines, and TBTC has furthered this). This works very well when there’s a timetable as everyone is working from the same hymn sheet. With no timetable it’s hard to take strategic decisions whilst technically only being responsible for a segment of the railway. This method of working contrasts sharply with something like the Central where the controller is still very much seen as “God”, even in a room where everyone is the same grade but performing designated roles on the day.

I think the thing to add to all this is that everyone at work is generally trying to do their best in the circumstances. The whole thing is quite novel for everyone in a number of ways. It’s always going to be the case that it’s never going to be 100% perfect all the time when essentially staff are having to make the service up as they go along.

I thought each depot on picadilly line is running 8 trains in theory should all be doing same amount of work unless there is more t/ops off or the tms aren't working as good as cockfosters as all depots got about the same amount of t/ops if you don't include night tube 

Quite incredible! The coverage on the west end of the Pic just doesn't allow that at the moment. We're fairly comfortably staffing our 6 or 7 trains throughout the day but no way we could with only doing one rounder each or people not sitting around spare for part of the duties in between bits etc. Usually a discernable difference in coverage between the east and west end even under normal circumstances from my understanding! Sorry to drift a little...

To be fair the reason for the bad atmosphere is largely due to external factors. This is amplifying work related issues which would normally be no more than minor gripes.

I don’t think this is unique to LU - for example my town seems to have descended into some pretty nasty vigilantism this weekend.

Heathrow’s Terminal 4 to close on Friday, Terminal 3 to follow suit by the end of the month leaving just 2 & 5. Bliss!

Some photos from Terminal 2 just before I made the questionable decision to race a golf cart in work boots which anyone who’s ever tried running in wellies knows how well that ends...

Terminal 2 departures AM peak


Terminal 2 PM departures peak


Terminal 2 race track (in my mind)

My apologies if this has already been covered upthread. My excuse is that at the start of the lockdown I was stuck in Mexico with intermittent comms and I had to speed-read when we got back to catch up on everything. What, I wonder, will be the long-term implications of the virus? Quite apart from the damage done to the economy and the tourist industry, with so many people working from home how many commuters, or their employers, will have found out that in fact they don’t need to come in so often, if at all? I suspect that TfL will be paying a heavy price for a long time to come.