70 cancellations now, Cornish branches decimated, Truro - Falmouth suspended.
How is this allowed to happen day after day? Is anyone taking responsibility for it? The last few weeks would suggest otherwise.
I have never run a big business - but I have run a small business, and also a small specialist department in a bigger company. Those operations have all required staff planning to cover scheduled opening hours, in one case cover from 06:30 or 07:30 to 21:00 with possible extension to 23:00 on short term demand. And with someone always on call / able to be present within 15 minutes. And I would have been ashamed, and really feel I had let my customers down, if me and the team had been unable to achieve the cover - allowing for a failure of perhaps a few hours every
year. We did not have the addition of geographic spread nor safety work hour regulations (though we were, I believe, always safe) that the rail industry has.
So much of what we managed came down to working as a team, appreciating the need to look after the customers and for
someone to work an anti-social shift to reach our combined objective. Often, this meant overtime hours over and above what made economic sense for the revenue raised during the extra shift. Apart from the geography / work hour regulations / longer training periods in the rail industry, where are the differences? I suspect they're in staff relations, they're in recruitment where people who worked for me knew the mandated 24x7 cover when taken on, in the ability to pay for enough cover to ensure we could handle unexpected requirements, in the committment of everyone to the greater good and customer service and, dare I say it, to planning for the cover.
This is not just a
GWR▸ problem though ... I have been watching Recent Train Times logs for Northern on a facebook group (like the Transwilts one I posted here a couple of days ago) and they too have a lot of orange - perhaps the same proportion. From a TransWilts viewpoint, the difference was the number of
successive trains cancelled, and the wait time for the next service (if there was one) ...15 or 30 minutes is rather different to [insert number] hours. I have even come across a rail industry organisation who are
DfT» recognised to represent the community who posted "We will be shutting up shop for the festive season from 24th Dec to 6th Jan. From all at [name deleted] - we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!" ...
while we leave you to fend for yourselves!