I think what Taplow Green said a few months back that you cannot rely on the railways at weekends and I’d include bank holidays as well.
Indeed, I have learnt to avoid travel at weekends or public holidays, but not everyone has the choice.
Years ago I travelled from Paddington on Maundy Thursday, and soon learned not to do that ever again. Local services may be acceptable as fewer commuters will be travelling, but long distance, no way.
And whilst I appreciate that roads and railways are not directly comparable, it is interesting to note that motorway engineering works are often postponed to avoid excessive delays to holiday traffic, whereas railway engineering works are specifically planned for bank holidays.
In the case of busy suburban commuter routes, bank holidays are in fact the best time for engineering work since traffic is much reduced.
Not so certain about longer distance routes with a largely holiday or leisure traffic though.
And in any case this weekends failures are largely down to basic incompetence.
In the case of the Brighton failure, a competently run railway would accept that if the main line has to be shut, that the diversionary route must not be shut at the same time, and moreover that FULL LENGTH trains must be run on the alternative route. NO more Southern/
GTR» nonsense of "it is a weekend so we run 4 car trains, be grateful for that"
And of course on
GWR▸ we had the long running lack of basic competence in failing to recruit, train, and keep enough staff to run the advertised service. The allied incompetence of network rail did not help, but had they published train plans in good time, I am not convinced that it would have gone much better. GWR would still not have had the staff even given more notice.
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