Coronavirus Implications For London's Transport

The problems on the Met are indeed directly related to a lack of service controllers.

There hasn’t been any meaningful service control training for the past year and so as people retire etc the resulting vacancies start to bite.

Service controller training requires hands on close proximity working between the instructor controller and trainee controller; certainly in the early stages at least. It’s impossible to do this sort of training whilst maintaining social distancing.

With many of us getting vaccinated now, hopefully the social distancing requirements will ease enough to allow close contact training to resume though of course nobody knows when that time will come. Then, as is much the case with night tube, the lengthy training process means that there won’t be any quick gains once training does resume.

re: people starting to travel by train again, a few days ago I mentioned to a relative my desire to do so 'asap' and received a horrified response along the tone of writing my will before I board the train as they are 'horribly infected / infectious'.

Their uninformed 'fake news' comment points to the mountain that public transport has to climb to get ordinary passengers back onboard.

I see using public transport as less risky than visiting a supermarket with many closely spaced aisles.

The logistics around social distancing are just one part of what was already complex broader issue that the UK transport industry has been grappling with for some time. I'm sure many on here will mention the sustained under-recruiting and poor retainership of qualified staff at certain grades which were already making staffing resilience within certain grades difficult. Covid-19 has made that difficult situation more or less untenable.

Even if all the difficulties around close quarters training can be overcome (which the simple fact is some simply cannot be), the years of skills shortages that we are seeing in the workplace will still continue to affect organisations like London Underground. Virtually every company involved with transport operations in this country is facing similar issues, Covid-19 has magnified issues that have been years in the making.

As these staff eventually return to work, will they require a period of refresher training before they can resume normal duties? That all adds to the delay before a resumption of service as normal!

“high risk” category can still choose not to return and will continue to receive LU sick pay until 21 June

I can understand the mounting frustration of both staff and passengers(customers if you must).

The elephant in this room is undoubtedly money - or lack of any.

I recall seeing a video of the new SSR control centre for the Thales system which seems a step up from past control rooms but as has been pointed out the current "training" approach is to mostly do it live in the real control room but under supervision - which inevitably means close proximity.

However am I right in assuming that the current problems are actually in the rural sections of the SSR which are not yet supervised by that spacious new control centre and it is availability of legacy control room staff where the problem lies?

So perhaps the time has come for TFL to realise this problem is not going to go away and they really need to create a covid friendly training suite specifically for legacy signalling controllers basically with mock ups of the legacy signalling controls which will allow instructors to be completely separated by Perspex screens but with good quality audio links to allow easy communication. Obviously building a legacy system simulator would not be cheap - so hopefully they can simply seek tenders to demonstrate to Whitehall that providing the funds to complete the 4LM/SSR signalling upgrade asap is actually cheaper than paying for custom legacy training facilities.  Otherwise Whitehall will continue to play the "not my problem" card.

Something like the TBTC / CBTC simulators are very realistic - each of the modern control rooms has a simulator thrown in as part of it. Certainly Highgate’s training room is massive, so no problem social distancing there.

But the problem is this is largely for signalling. The controller role is very different, and much harder to train for as it has to account variables which are only found in the real world.

The rooms which have a combined controller/signaller setup have a massive advantage, as they can train someone on the signaller function only, and then use them to cover a live signal desk whilst releasing a qualified controller to cover that function. Hammersmith unfortunately doesn’t have this setup, so is suffering accordingly.

Remember also that to train someone up as a TBTC / CBTC signaller is essentially coming up to three months, by the time the person has done their core training, line specific training, and had at least a couple of weeks on the real desk. And that probably assumes someone already has a reasonable knowledge of the line, job roles etc.

Where they are suffering on top of this is that Hammersmith has gained a bad reputation as a place to work, for various reasons, and that’s not helping attract people to work there.

If an actor gets covid you stop filming for a couple of weeks while relevant people isolate, if a trainee gets covid and you send the relevant people home, I don't need to finish this sentence, 

SNAP!!!  Doesn't allow any refresher training time, though!

So there is some form of 'shadow' running to retain driver competency and presumably there's a maintenance benefit in using assets?

Pre-covid, there was of course the big Northern line shutdown scheduled for this summer. Is that still going ahead this year, or has that been deferred? Was the Waterloo & City line planned to operate any additional services prior to covid for this work and will they still run?

(Apologies if this is better off elsewhere)

Whomever is in charge of working it out (and I haven't foggiest who that would be) has (hopefully!) calculated that there will be enough drivers and control room staff, etc available to run a useful service on both W&C and Central, without needing to use anyone who needs and has not yet had refresher training.
Obviously things are not completely within their control, as between now and then there could be a covid outbreak that takes out a significant number of staff, which is why this isn't being shouted about and is only "expected" to happen.

For anyone interested, there is a graph in the following video talk from a current employee at TFL (at 17:30) which shows how passenger numbers have changed during the pandemic for both underground and buses:

Not sure this is entirely accurate to be fair, the Picc's not had the best of evenings, with delays due to an earlier customer incident. Not sure if the service was partially suspended at all at any point, but having just checked the service status, it's still recovering now. Having looked at the tweet, my guess is this was at the height of the disruption from said customer incident, but I could be wrong.