Daily Cancellations

Covid is going to have significant impacts on train services for a long time to come - the Met is far from being the only line impacted. Whilst things like self isolations may be declining, a training backlog of the best part of two years (whilst, of course, people still retire, transfer or get promoted) still exists, and this can’t be sped up in any meaningful way. Instructors themselves are a commodity and there’s a shortage of training courses to contend with as well. By the way - this doesn’t just impact drivers, but the whole combine.

As someone who has oversight of the daily ‘ONA’ - Operator Not Available - list for the Met, there’s still a very high proportion of uncovered trains. As has been touched upon before, this won’t directly correlate to trains not running either; you can’t simply leave a train on a running line if there isn’t a driver available.

Trains cancelled doesn’t also necessarily mean a service isn’t ‘good’ - although it is accepted the Met is a bit of a special case on this too. Unlike other lines it isn’t always as easy to manage headways to ‘disappear’ the gaps because of the branches - but where possible this regulation is still provided particularly south of Harrow.

I’m sure someone else will be able to link to relevant threads to expand on some of this; I don’t currently have the time I’m afraid!

As MoreToJack alludes to above, a given line's service status message has to encompass the whole line a general one-size-fits-all solution but that sometimes doesn't reflect the true situation at a particular given point on a line.

South of Harrow on the Hill towards Baker Street & Aldgate the service is frequent. Now imagine you've got a number of trains cancelled heading into the central zone 1 area from outer London. Not consecutively but there's a number of trains missing in that higher frequency area. The whole line's service status message may well stay shown as good service because the gaps are spread out and barely noticeable.

But those trains will of course go to & from the outer ends of the line where frequencies are anything from 10 minutes to 30 minutes between trains. A cancellation will certainly be noticed in those area's. One train cancelled to Chesham is arguably a severe delay whilst a cancellation to Watford could be argued as a minor delay. You'd probably need a couple of trains cancelled on the trot get minor delays to Uxbridge.

So one train gets cancelled to Chesham and a severe delay is now incurred by those customers. Would changing the whole line status for the Metropolitan line to severe delays be a true reflection of the service across the whole line? Of course it wouldn't; its a localised delay on one small part of the line.

Now lets say there's 10 trains cancelled across the whole Metropolitan line. A snap shot of the whole line shows that those 10 trains are missing thus: Gap at Rayners lane towards Uxbridge. Gap at Rayners Lane towards Aldgate. Gap at Rickmansworth towards Aldgate. Gap at Harrow on the Hill towards Aldgate. Gap at Finchley road towards Aldgate. Gap at Moorgate towards Aldgate. Gap at Liverpool Street towards Chesham. Gap at Baker Street towards Uxbridge. Gap at Wembley Park towards Watford. Gap at Harrow on the Hill towards Amersham.

Given that the Piccadilly line also serves the Uxbridge branch and Chiltern also run between Harrow on the Hill & Amersham, would it actually be a true reflection of the whole line's service status to show the whole line as minor delays with the gaps for the 10 cancelled trains spread out as shown? I would suggest the line would still show a good service status with those 10 gaps.

Point is it's very easy to experience a delay on your particular part of a given line yet the line as a whole is operating differently. As I said at the start of this post, the service status message cannot always cater for the whole line as a general one-size-fits-all solution.

Super detailed response, thank you. But that still does absolutely nothing to alleviate the frustrations of your average commuter. If other organisations can function in a post Covid world, it's unfortunate the Underground can't, especially considering what we pay for it.

Absolutely true. And TfL doesn't seem to care.

Additionally, the visible impact to the end user of a single missing service controller is very significantly greater than the impact of a single missing service controller. While a single missing driver is not as significant as a service controller, it doesn't take many before impacts are very noticeable - especially if there was a shortage (or even just no slack) before the pandemic.

This does not explain why different service statuses cannot be applied to different parts of the line though.

It's actually better that they just run the trains they're supposed to. It boils my blood every morning to see those white boards.

I am not sure what your point is but many classes are being cancelled because of covid.

I think because roverlei is a new member of the forum, the mutual respect and understanding part hasn't yet been fully understood. We all have our frustrations but on this forum, we play nicely. If we have a point to make, we make it respectfully and a lot of the members have a wealth of knowledge and experience to get fully comprehensive and accurate responses. Just saying.

Would it be possible to amend the digital platform displays north of Harrow (main line) so that they operate in a similar manner to how the national rail ones work, showing specific times and whether the train is on time, or cancelled? Not sure why TFL don't make effort to treat the outer reaches of the met differently......

LU's style is more useful when you are catching any service going in the right direction. NR's style is more useful when you are catching a specific service. However this is tangential to the line status messages saying "good service", meaning you head to the station expecting to catch a train in the next standard interval on your route, only to get to the platform and find that while there should be a train within 15 minutes the next one is 45 minutes away, so you have to exit the station (possibly incurring a charge, up to the max fare, for having been on the platform) and then go and find a bus or other alternative route (which may or may not be close, convenient, or even running without disruption).

Well obviously any system that is displaying correct information is better than any other system that is displaying incorrect information, that's not comparing like with like though.

Traditionally it was never possible to provide 'timetabled' or 'real time' train running info on the Met on platform-based DMIs anyway - the legacy train description (TD) feeds are somewhat 'dumb' and work by trains dropping track circuits (or signals clearing) to pass the code to the next area of control. This has been described in the past on this forum so I won't go into it again.

Preparatory works for 4LM, including adding DMIs to platforms that didn't previously have them, has brought some level of realtime info to the line - although it really can only be described as a bodge. It takes those legacy TD codes and fuses them with data from Trackernet and Connect Radio, allowing some level of countdown to be provided. It's far from perfect, but it's certainly better than what came before (until the signaller changes the TD at Harrow for a diversion that's been known about since Aldgate, but hadn't previously gone through the road correctly).

However, even where this system uses directly-fed timetable information (that is, for Chiltern services), it is still only displayed as a 'countdown' style. I'd agree with some of the arguments that this can be improved upon for the Chiltern/Amersham/Chesham services north of Ricky, and it certainly should be possible once 4LM is fully rolled out to the Met.

As for service status boards - simply, politics. I believe the matrix for determining service status has been posted here before, but whether it is always followed correctly is often out of the hands of line control staff. There aren't many of us who don't agree with the points raised that a more granular message could be provided, particularly for the North Met branches.

The original post is about the Met. A north west description would cover Amersham, Chesham and Watford.

Not helpful for a cancellation on one of the 3.

Much of the DMI information on the Underground is cobbled together from very old technology. Many years ago I remember seeing the desktop computer that provided the Bakerloo line information. Your mobile phone has more computing power.

So the question remains.........how do you expect LU to run trains without drivers that are off sick for exactly the same reason as your colleagues?

By the logic of you teaching extra classes I guess we could bung a few extra carriages on. Only problem with that is the platforms aren't long enough.

You're possibly working overtime to cover the extra workload. The problem with that is the train driving grade cannot do overtime on LU.

Train more drivers? Well we are, but it takes 16 weeks to train a new driver (not long enough IMO but that's another discussion). Part of that training involves releasing instructors from their rostered driving duties.......and that starts a vicious cycle where you've got an instructor released trying to train a new driver to fill a gap but we haven't always got enough spare drivers to cover for the released instructor. We'll have enough once that new driver qualifies....

And that 16 weeks is assuming there are no delays caused to training by either instructor or trainee testing positive for covid.

All that being said, not all cancelations are down to a lack of available drivers. Parts supply is still an issue and the S stock fleet has suffered greatly due to parts supply issues as it was built using suppliers from all over Europe.

As previously mentioned, Service control and signallers have suffered staffing issues and their absences can far have more impact on service provision than a few missing drivers.

Bottom line though, with respect, is we're talking about a railway not a school classroom. Some of us have gone to great lengths to be explain the situation from the inside; I hope you've found it useful as boiling blood doesn't sound too healthy. If your blood is still boiling, I'm afraid there's not much more we can say to help you.