Met line service - service suspensions summer 2021

Not my experience at Ricky yesterday, Notice in Booking Hall No service between 1130 & 1200 due to lack of Control Room Staff and barriers set to exit only. I returned at about 1220 to travel to Chesham, Chiltern services had been restored but very little information.

Two Northbound trains terminated at Platform 1 and then returned to Baker Street running Fast. At around 1300 the T/OP of the second train returning southbound announced that it he thought there might be a Chesham train in about 20 minutes. At that point I gave up the idea of walking The Chess Valley path from Chesham back to Ricky and left the station.

the travel information email sent out on Thursday detailed:


all due to the ongoing issues at Hammersmith Service Control Centre (MET)

There’s a shortage of service control staff at Hammersmith this weekend, with just a single Service Controller L2 available for large parts of the day (or none at all). This is a repeat of previous instances earlier on in the year, and is due to a variety of factors including Covid-19, training and industrial relations.

A reduced service is running between Baker Street and Uxbridge/Watford/Chesham, with the Chesham services running fast, calling at Wembley.

As the single member of staff also requires a meal break, a complete cessation of service is required with no trains running. This was taken between 1130 and 1200 and 1600 and 1630 yesterday and today; as a result Chiltern and Piccadilly services were suspended over the Met also. Once services resumed an amount of service recovery was required to get trains back on their booked paths.

Thanks @moretojack. Most enlightening.

I feel that TfL are making a bit more of a mess than they need to with this - the TfL website contradicts what posters say at stations and Chiltern say on their website which agree with each other. Is that because TfL have been able to improve the control room coverage and posters and Chiltern are now out of date? Most passengers will take a single source of information as the truth and now check elsewhere, and at the moment I have no clue if there will be a service this evening after 1800 ish.

Obviously some planning has gone into this situation as replacement bus services were provided although they were swamped and overcrowded.

Also I have feedback that although the service should resumed after 2030 last night the met service was pretty sparse to non-existant apart from Chiltern who were busy as a result...

I can't say I particularly paid any attention to the website... the customer comms at stations echo the information we've had in service control - that is, no services at all over the Met line after 1800 yesterday, with only Chiltern and Piccadilly line trains resuming after 2100. There was never any intention to provide Met line services once night turn coverage was provided (mainly for the reason that by the time you've brought all the trains out, it's pretty much time to start putting them away again!).

The coverage issues only became known last week so, whilst some planning has taken place with RRBs, this was very much on an 'emergency' basis, using pre-prepared plans and timetables. I'm sure others can enlighten more on that side of things.

On the Jubilee line the Service Manager had to keep up a license to operate as a Line Controller, so they did time on the control desk, used to refer to it as keeping up “Flying Hours.”
Also Line Controllers use to be a higher Control Grade rate of pay, plus they had Relief Line Controllers who could work on any line.

And it is all happening again June 5/6 with a Test Match at Lord's albeit at only one third capacity and replacement bus services

I'd trust the results of large scale professionally-conducted research massively significantly more than a few anecdotes from a small sample of people very familiar with LU - especially given that the target market for the announcements is principally those who are not very familiar with the system.

What is the service pattern going to be on Monday?

I'm sure LU have very good reasons for the incessant closure of the HC & C and parts of the Met at weekends, but it is getting extremely tiresome.

It would be good if they had a section of their site where they explained what they are doing when the repeatedly close the lines at weekends for (literally) years. Once you know why they are closing the line it gets much less irritating.

I thought that once the resignalling at the western end of the line was complete we would once again get a reliable weekend service, but it actually seems to have got a lot worse recently.

I was really thinking more of the recent 'whole weekend / weekend + bank holiday' closures. Or are they also caused by staff shortages?

Whatever, I think passengers would really appreciate some insight. 'Covid related staff shortages', or, 'Major infrastructure maintenance', would, I'm sure, be a lot better received than: 'no service'. Also, when we are getting repetitive weekend closures caused by infrastructure work, some idea of the timescale for the disruption would be nice.

I could give you a really great response, as someone who actually works in the affected department, but the complete assumption of bad faith makes me think otherwise.

Let’s not let facts get in the way of a good rant, eh?

TFL’s communication to the public is poor, granted.
However, I think it should be noted that TFL staff work very hard to keep the service running, even more so during the recent difficult times.

Whilst I can appreciate that these are unusual times and that there is no doubt a good explanation for the ongoing problems, not being able to run the timetabled and advertised service so extensively is something that just shouldn't be happening. The seemingly very poor communication makes it even worse.

To put it another way - the more often an unreliable service causes passengers to seek alternative modes of travel (on the met line generally the car), the more likely it is that those alternatives will become permanent. That is not good for TfL, nor for the environment in the long run. You simply can't just not run a service at evenings and weekends without warning and expect the line to remain attractive to passengers. The existence or absence of a good reason for this situation within TfL internally doesn't change that.

Therefore whilst I disagree with the tone of eastlondoner123, I can understand the underlying frustration.

MoreToJack I would be very interested in that response. It would also be interesting to get an idea of when the control room issues might start to be resolved.