.... and in any case it's a pretty poor aircon system that breaks down once the temperature rises ........it's the whole point of it, whether its 25 or 28 degrees.....it's sort of symptomatic of the lack of robustness and resilience of the railway industry as a whole, unreliable trains, signals, staff etc?
This forum was set up on the back of a lack of appropriate service - and that was overcrowded trains that had been shortened, train schedules that had been slashed so that one previously-busy commuter route (at least) no longer had what the users regarded as a peak train, other services cut back so that one station has just 4 carriages instead of 12 into it's commuter hub in the peak hour, and services so likely to be cancelled that we had to extend the axes of our graphs to 50% cancelled.
We moved rapidly (we didn't think it was rapid at the time!) to a situation where some of these issues were sorted out. And we came to understand how other issues were systemic and longstanding and couldn't / wouldn't be cured quickly. Rail is a long term industry, and if you plan a long term industry based on a conservative forecast of 0.8% but then get compound 8.0%, you've got a problem - over 10 years you expected to grow from 100 to 108 passengers, but you've actually grown to twice that - 216 passengers, and you can't just turn up the production line speed at a train factory and press the "widen" button to add more tracks overnight.
Particular problems over recent times have been in the Thames Valley - London to Reading. I recall being told that there are 60 different types of point motor in use in the
UK▸ ... and no less than 30 of them could be found on the London to Reading section. What a nightmare to maintain, and to fix if something goes wrong. And problems over the last few days and not for the first time on the TransWilts ... but the system of signalling from Thingley to Westbury is so old that the signalman from Swindon has to phone up Westbury to ask to send a train, and the equipment at Thingley is again rather old and due to be replaced. For robustness and resilience, standard signalling needs to be put in there, the junction relayed as a double junction which provides a refuge for a train waiting for the line clear of the main line, and allowing other trains to pass.
But (I'm getting to a point at last!) the staff for the most part are doing their very best with the systems they have, sometimes very much in the face of hostile customers; we certainly should not be lumping them in with "robustness and resilience" issues. I was very disappointed indeed when service were cancelled a couple of months back due to lack of staff, but I was more than disappointed - I was shocked - at the reaction of a member of the travelling public who suggested to me that the cancellation was due to a driver not being bothered to get up; said member of the travelling public rapidly changed his tune when I asked whether he really thought a driver would risk his career by being unavailable because he wanted the day off ... I suggested it could have been illness, and that the customer wouldn't want higher fares to have lots of spare 'just in case' drivers. And indeed it turned out to be a rostering error ...
My point it - we should not lump in the staff with the criticism. The more of them I get to know, the more of them I admire. The more I see the system they have to deal with, the more I respect and admire them. Sometimes perverse decisions - or rather apparently perverse decisions - are explained and what looked odd becomes obvious. And at other times there's little chance to explain because it would hold up a train.
A big "thank you" then to the operational staff. A bigger "thank you" to those who go over and above in order to post here. And a request to posters - ask, criticise the system, enquire robustly ... but for goodness sake don't alienate the very people who DO go above and beyond to explain to us here!
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