Coronavirus Implications For London's Transport

Your point is well made, it does seem to be the case that there’s significant variations between locations. I have a pretty good idea why the Northern, historically a fairly placid line in ER terms, has gone sour, but it’s probably not appropriate to go into detail. Suffice to say your last sentence is very relevant...

I’d say the biggest things generally are
1) People skills - it’s curious that for a company that spent much of the last two decades being a “people company” so many managers seem to lack this, and it isn’t just the old hands either, on the contrary in many cases.
2) Willingness of local management to challenge “on high” when there’s a good case for doing so.
3) Railway knowledge, which translates to good decision making. Again this is very lacking in some cases nowadays.

All three are relevant to the current situation, especially (3) in that we wouldn’t have had the timetable farce if those on high has been on top of events. This would have dampened so many of the issues in my neck of the woods.

Some of the issues aren’t within LU’s gift - it’s human nature to be infuriated watching the messroom TV and seeing large segments of the population gridlocking beaches instead of being at work for example - however notwithstanding this it shouldn’t have been so difficult to motivate people to operate fairly empty trains round without all the usual hassles like PEAs, drunks and the like, yet is clearly has in some places. I’d say it’s a culmination of management not really having a handle on the situation, which is then being interpreted as “we don’t give a toss about you”. Sorting out all this has very much been dumped on local staff, so it’s no surprise people are peeved. It naturally follows that some lines / locations have been much better at sorting this mess out than others.

The Northern for example went for the entire duration of the special service without any clearly defined plan from management beyond that which would normally be used for a special. So daily variations on numbers of trains in service, headway, first and last trains, early morning service, closedown, how outstanding is handled, et cetera. In the event one depot eventually had something drawn up by a union rep, which helped a lot.

Yes agreed fully. It doesn’t help when we see problematic drivers promoted to managerial positions, which indicates there’s issues inherent in the recruitment process.

However notwithstanding all this, on my patch I’m not convinced getting out of work is the primary issue. Most people seem to have been happy to do their bit, the problem has been that people feel they’ve been being made to do others’ bit too, and the facts bear this out - 100 into 80 doesn’t go, nor does 12 into 4.

Indeed most absence (where I am) is due to shielding, even in the height of all this surprisingly few were off due to isolating, even when it was (and to a large extent continues to be) something easy to do as such absences don’t count under the attendance policy.

It shouldn’t be surprising that people who come to work consistently get infuriated finding themselves having to do others’ work on top of their own, especially when in normal times it’s the self-same people time after time.

Yes it’s always worth remembering that a small bunch of people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of trouble.

In other news, the Northern returns to a special service over the weekend, which my understanding is was always the plan. However, for some reason they are postulating the idea of Edgware to Morden via Bank and Barnet to Kennington via CX. With the disclaimer that there’s a small chance there could be some engineering reason why this has been proposed, this seems like complete madness.

Seven weeks of special, a hurrendous week trying to run a normal timetable with sub-normal numbers of staff, and now the bright idea to run three days of a completely different form of special - with half the service isolated from the two maintenance depots. One can’t help but wonder if someone has a vendetta against the people who are actually trying to run the service on the ground.

EDIT: less than 24 hours after I wrote this the proposal has been dropped and they will be back to running the established special service over the weekend. Meanwhile those on the ground are left pondering why on earth someone would come up with something so daft. In the longer term some *serious* thought is going to have to be invested into how we get the railway expertise back into LU, or perhaps more correctly how we ensure what we do have is involved in decision making at higher levels. This whole affair has really exposed the lack of it at present.

So it’s changed from face covering to face mask now?

It’s all well and good doing this but it dosen’t necessarily protect you any more than no covering at all as your eyes are still exposed - and if it’s gonna be made compulsory they need to be readily available & easy to buy which I would question at this time given the global demand for PPE.

Still, politics is more about what you say than what you actually do.

The problem is with home made masks. If made from a T shirt the material may not stop globules passing through it. Hold the material up to the light and you may be able to see the gaps.

Thanks for the added explanations - I was already aware of the differences though others may not be.

The specific point I was attempting to make in my last post was that of making the wearing of masks compulsory. To do that when they’re not readily available just seems a bit ridiculous and ill thought out.

Whilst being mindful of the stance of this forum regarding neutrality when it comes to politics, I just can’t help but think certain things are easy to throw about when one is trying to keep the public on one’s side without actually thinking through the practicality of such notions.

I think in this case they seem to be working on the basis of “any mask is better than no mask”. Whether that’s true is of course a matter for conjecture.

Personally I think there’s some merit in it. The difficulty we have is that one can make an effort to do all the distancing, then find someone else compromises it in a way over which you have little control. Just recently I was on a pretty empty Tube train (only 1 or 2 in each car) yet a woman got on at Camden and sat directly opposite, and to make it worse then promptly coughed. There’s no hope when some people are this lacking in awareness (I’m being diplomatic here, other stronger words may be more accurate).

After that incident I’ve tended to use back cabs, although that isn’t a panacea either as there’s just guaranteed to be someone blocking the J door who then gets the rear-end at having to move - unfortunately on most our platforms the rear cab side doors stop in the tunnel.

Completely agree with the sentiments about compulsory masks when they’re certainly not readily available. The idea of people making their own just seems rather lame to me.

There was a 20 minute session on Good Morning Britain yesterday. During this a university professor demonstrated that masks made from materials like t shirts don't stop the globules that put people at risk. You might be OK if you put coffee filters in them.

I wonder if the Mayor might consider compulsory masks for those groups most likely to be affected by the virus? 

As the Mayor said at MQT while he could make masks (face coverings or whatever you want to call them) compulsory on TfL services not all services in Greater London are TfL and not all TfL services are in Greater London. The scope for confusion is pretty obvious, if TfL acted on its own then it would create a situation where one rule applied here and another rule applied there.

Would passengers travelling from Reading to Paddington have to wear a mask to get on a TfL Rail train but not a GWR train?  Or would passengers have to put masks on after they left Slough but before they arrived at West Drayton?



As a side note the Central Line is pretty empty after 6pm, this week I had to ride back on the cushions from White City to Leytonstone around 8:30pm, in recent weeks I've gone in the rear cab but I didn't bother this time and I had the car to myself for almost the entire journey (one person got on at Oxford Circus and got off at Mile End).

Do you know of drivers who could (ie had their rest period) drive in the rush hour but weren't asked to? I saw something here a month ago saying drivers weren't interested in a peak only schedule.

I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to push some of the middle turns (which don’t really contribute much to either peak) either forwards or backwards, plus reduce the number of dead late duties. Likewise a heavily reduced service at weekends with more MF duties (which would presumably go down well with crews given how many hate working weekends).

Difficult choices for sure, however sooner or later there’s going to have to be a massive push to get as many people as possible back to work, although of course the schools situation is another major roadblock to achieving this.

Some lines are still experiencing massive numbers of cancellations. It’s no good to anyone limping along in that way.

Prior to Company Plan and salaried status we did work split-shifts, paid at 12hrs, although only working 4hr AM and 4hr PM with the ‘free’ time in between paid. 12hr between PM and AM shifts of course.