Cancelled then re-instated.

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From The Guardian. ... an example of a service cancelled the re-instated and the aftermath

My family of four was travelling back from France in February. En route I checked our Eurostar connection from Lille to London and found its status had changed from “on time” to “cancelled”.

Eurostar confirmed the cancellation and said there was no availability on any train that day.

The agent offered to rebook the next day and pay up to €600 for hotel accommodation or else refund our €409 tickets.

Because we had to get home that day I asked for a refund and booked an easyJet flight at more than €900.

There followed a mad dash to the airport and frantic repacking of our luggage to go from train- to budget airline-friendly.

On the plane, my husband suggested I take a screenshot of Eurostar’s cancelled status for our records. To my horror the status had changed to “on time”.

Cutting a long article short ... it appears in hindsight that the service was cancelled, but then re-instated within quite a short time.  During that cancellation period, agents offered their best alternative - travel the following day, with hotel bill paid - which was not acceptable so family flew at greater cost to themselves, which Eurostar are unwilling to re-imburse.  And it does appear that information systems during and after the event have been less than totally accurate and complete, failing to admit (for example) that the service was cancelled at any point.

Posting here under a domestic / GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) board, as the issue of cancellations and re-instatements also applies locally and perhaps too frequently.   Look back to last Sunday and my records here on the forum report 6 out of 13 services flagged as cancelled at Melksham.  Look at Real Time Trains and you'll see 4 cancelled because one round trip was re-instated.  Look at other figures and perhaps you'll be told of just 2 cancellations, as one round trip (the one from Weymouth to Swindon and back) ran part-route - Heart of Wessex it ran, through to the TransWilts it didn't.

The root solution is to have reliable trains and infrastructure and sufficient crews so that the number of trains that have to be cancelled is minimal. But when something does go wrong in one of those areas, GWR's day to day managers are left with hard calls - whether to cancel a service because it probably can't run or leave it in place, with customers making their plans based on a false positive.  I have much sympathy for them, and no evidence that they don't get the balance right (I do, however, question balance on which services to cancel at times - puling infrequent services totally at times rather than thinning frequent ones).

No neat answer - a whole-hearted support of telling people early of a cancellation (could there be a new category of "service in doubt"?) if it's probable, a whole-hearted support of reinstatement if it's possible even if the train is significantly undersubscribed because of the confusion.