Coronavirus Implications For London's Transport

I'm not an IOp so its not a decision I will have to make but as you said we're not at war so I don't see why anyone should risk their health and possibly their life by working in an environment where they didn't feel safe. Keeping the service running is management's responsibility and if they want to resume training they are going to have to convince the IOps that its safe to do so.

I didn't say it would be a convincing case!

I doubt if Hainault - Woodford will be closed, too many TfL executives living in Chigwell

Someone claims to have seen a document from KPMG who were given the task of reviewing TfL's operations by the Transport Secretary

Suggestions include...

. Tube services to be cut by up to 20% (line dependant)

. Some central and urban stations to close early and open later.

. Nominee passes which have been dormant for 12 months will be stopped.

. A 3 year pause on recruitment. Positions to be filled by secondments.

. Possibility of bringing back remote booking at certain locations.

. All staff to have a yearly review with senior management on their attendance.

. Long term sicknesses to be dealt with with much harsher measures.

. Annual leave entitlement and arrangements across TfL to be rearranged.

. Duty times to change in some locations dependent on feasibility to avoid staff taxis being used.

. All lines to be fully automated by 2035 upon which driverless technology will be looked at.



Sounds like another "Beeching" where they are asking people who can read a spreadsheet but with no transport experience for advice on how to run a railway.

The difficulty is that many of the lavish frequencies listed above have arisen mainly because there is no way to reverse large numbers of trains further in. You could push the boat out by using reversing sidings more intensively, but this carries significant performance risks. Indeed all-day Piccadilly to Uxbridge came about primarily because reversing the whole service at Rayners was too fragile.

The thing is at the moment whilst traffic levels are down, it’s primarily peak loadings which are absent. Since there seems little prospect of an en-masse return to office work, despite several Boris false starts, I’d suggest pruning the peak service and perhaps a reduction during less busy times like mid to late evening would be more likely.

On something like a 95 stock I think there would be room to have a hinged dividing screen which could be deployed to screen off the driving position (a bit like some gangwayed mainline trains have). For ventilation purposes it wouldn’t be able to reach ceiling level, not sure if it would need to though? When out of use it could be folded - I suspect it couldn’t just sit across the J doorway as this is an emergency exit.

Totally not ideal for a whole range of reasons, but we’re not going to be finding an ideal solution here, nor anything close. For run of the mill training how often does a trainee need to access the instructor’s side, especially outside of stations?

I realise that on stocks with less spacious cabs this would probably be a non starter. 73 stock for sure, and I would suspect 92 stock as well.

There would need to be some serious thought given to what happens when safety routines need to be followed, for example CSDE override.

A solution will *have* to be found to this, as we cannot run a railway with no training.

Having the instructor in the saloon may be okay for certain activities (licensed drivers returning, managers doing their driving hours, et cetera), but in my opinion it’s no good for job training.

I have volunteered as part of the I/Op grade to take part in the trial. It was delayed due to a couple of lines jumping the gun with in-cab training and the TU's threw their toys out of the pram and refused to be a part of further discussions. I think that may have been resolved now and we are due to have another briefing session with the training team in the coming days.

The trial will start with drivers that require an action plan after an operational incident or for refresher training after being away from driving. We have a big issue as mentioned in an earlier post in terms of space in the '73 stock. Added to that, the AC just circulates the air so we will find out shortly what the mitigation plans are.

As others have mentioned, training needs to restart of we will seriously run short of drivers. The Picc over the past few years bore the brunt of the training due to both night tube and the constant exodus to other lines. There are a lot of I/Op's on our line as well that aren't interested in being part of the trial. That's a decision for them. The only outcome if we don't train is to reduce the service. It probably needs reducing anyway given the circumstances but writing new timetables and schedules is a time consuming job.

Putting this link up for anyone who is exempt from wearing a face covering on public transport, etc.

hiddendisabilitiesstore.com/hidden-disabilities-face-covering.html

You might gain the thin end of a wedge?

Exactly.

Lest we forget, every time that a certain political group in the London Assembly raises the potential value of nominee passes (and equates them to an annual all-zone travelcard), TfL always responds that they are cost-neutral.

Providing nominees with free travel does not require any additional services to be operated and removing them would bring in a maximum revenue of around £7.32m - if, and only if, all of the following conditions were true:
1. Every member of staff (28k) has a nominee
2. If the nominee passes were to be withdrawn, they would all buy Z1-9 travelcards to compensate
3. 100% of travelcard revenue was to go to TfL.

As none of these conditions are true then the potential increase in revenue is always going to be smaller.

Surprising no mention of Night Tube, not in name anyway.

Don’t get the obsession with nominee passes TBH.

I never said National Rail was overseen by railway people, hence my cynical assertion that we’d see one lot of politicians replaced by another.

I’d take serious issue with your assertion that we can vote the Mayor out though. *You* may be able to if you happen to live within London, *I* not living in London cannot, despite being a stakeholder in London transport. I’ve always objected to that, so detangling London transport from the Mayor would be an excellent result in my book, and wouldn’t be a bad longer term outcome of Covid. Never know, some day we might actually get a political setup which sits back and allows railway people a free hand...

We've been over this again and again.

Yes, you could make the driver sit away from the cab and call it a 'driver-less train' but it would be a lie.

To make it driver-less in reality, getting the train to drive itself from A to B is probably less than half the work. For the train to be truly driver-less you need to be able to handle any and every exception condition either automatically, or remotely.

I've been told that there have been a few attempts at moving trains in and out of Northumberland Park depot "driverless" and each time they managed to derail themselves which suggests that the current signalling system isn't quite ready to support driverless operation.  Then there's the issue of passenger safety and referring back to the 2014 New Train for London Feasibility Report the Victoria Line would need Platform Edge Doors installed before driverless operation could commence which isn't going to be cheap.

Frankly if management could get rid of drivers they'd do it tomorrow, the reason we're still here is because driverless operation isn't going to be as easy as some imagine.

Off peak service frequencies do not need to be anywhere close to full to be worth operating / cover their costs. There is a good deal of misunderstanding among both rail enthusiasts and railway staff of the purpose of high frequency off peak services and what frequency is worth operating. It seems to be widely assumed that the correct frequency is the minimum number of services that will carry the expected passenger load. However, if this were the case there would be some UK rail routes that would need only daily or less than daily services (as some Amtrak routes in the US). Having a frequent service is desirable because it increases opportunity to travel and reduces time spent waiting, either at the origin or the destination. People seek to arrive at a target time that does not require time to be wasted, for example by arriving much earlier than their ideal time or appointment, aside from whatever margin a passenger adds for possible delay.

On the least frequent National Rail lines, such as those to the far north of Scotland or Middlesborough to Whitby, some people will have to travel many hours earlier than they need or even the day before. This makes the service much less attractive than road travel, where the opportunity to travel is always available (though of course such journeys will still have their own margins for disruption). On a suburban London rail route with an off peak service of2 trains per hour (tph) - as many still are, it might mean having to get to the destination 25 minutes before you need, as the next service would get the passenger to their destination 5 minutes too late.

On frequent (turn up and go) Metro services (such as the examples in your post) this time is effectively the extra ‘waiting time’ at the station that is added at the start of the journey to allow enough time for the longest gap between trains. All of this extra wasted time is part of what is known as the ‘generalised cost’ of rail travel and the more of it there is, the less likely people are to make extra journeys, so lower frequency services are less attractive and get fewer passengers.

The other key point that makes higher off peak frequencies sensible concerns the cost of operation. Trains and the infrastructure they need are very expensive buy (high fixed costs), but fairly cheap to run (low variable costs). This means that it is worthwhile operating trains that attract enough extra passengers to cover their variable costs and make a contribution towards the fixed costs. The costs of the crew and the power / fuel do vary directly with the amount of service kilometres operated, but even train and track maintenance is only partly variable. Other maintenance, such as signalling hardly varies at all with service volume; after all you need the signalling system to be functioning even to operate the first two trains. Thus the variable per kilometre cost of running a typical metro train is around the same as a licensed taxi fare. A typical metro journey from terminus to terminus will break even on its variable costs even with as few as 30 passengers at its busiest point.

Population growth has led to increased traffic across the whole of London at all times, but [non crisis] off peak traffic has grown by a greater proportion than peak traffic and lines across London whose off peak services have been increased have mostly seen far greater growth. In the current crisis, high off peak services are allowing more passengers to make journeys while being able to maintain a good level of social distancing and as demand begins to recover across the rail network, even if it takes some years to return to its previous levels, companies will need to be wary of service cuts – they may find that with less attractive services, their revenue falls to a greater degree than their costs. Previous rounds of rail cuts have amply demonstrated that it is hard to escape the spiral of decline and that there is no profitable trunk waiting to be revealed by simply pruning a few loss making branches…