As no ticket gates look like they will never be installed at Sheffield
 maybe Northern should be more interested in staffing their trains correctly

Is this was privatisation was about?

There was a Service Level Commitment which provided a description of services to be provided on Monday to Friday, Saturday and Sunday - now sure what it said about Bank Holidays and "Holiday Shoulders", with the franchise holders doing their best to maximise their net receipts after running expenses were taken off.  I don't know what detail was in them about replacement transport.

The SLC^▸ (Service Level Commitment) for Swindon to Westbury over a decade ago was notorious ... "2 trains a day shall run each way from Swindon to Westbury on Monday to Saturdays. On Monday to Friday one service must arrive in Swindon before 08:30 and one must leave after 17:30.    Some bright spark in the old First Great Western Intercity team that won the right to operate the line, previously Wessex Trains, noted that an arrival into Swindon at 07:45 and a departure at 18:45 was allowed, and that if a train ran from Swindon at 06:15 it could effectively form the 07:45 arrival, using a unit off the Stroud Valley line that wasn't needed there until around 07:50 from Swindon,  and that with a train as late as 18:45, it had done its day on the Stround Valley and could run back into Swindon at around 20:20.   I don't think they ever expected the 06:15 departure and 20:20 arrival to do much business, but they were save the cost of hiring a train for the line.

The Sunday SLC was worse - it said "2 trains shall run from Westbury to Swindon" and we were treated to a couple of years of a northbound service only, with an empty train running the other way.  One of the early victories for common sense put that train into passenger service.

We have come a very, very long way since those days.

Tomorrow will be quiet.  Most folk will have travelled yesterday or today.

That presumably means that anyone from northern England heading towards Chester or north Wales will need to travel via Liverpool and the slow crawl down the Wirral.

We were due to be heading to north Wales today (though not from the north) and I'm fairly glad not to be doing it, given the general uncertainty, though sad to miss out on the festivities once we got there. Unfortunately my partner has gone down with a winter bug and we won't be travelling anywhere.

GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) still uses communication by fax as well.  To get short notice driver diagrams from the control office to the depot the driver is one example.  Not sure of the difference between that and a printed email?

What a silly article.

The fact that fax has become so little used is an advantage for some purposes. It arrives at a place, not into an e-mail account, and prints itself. That avoids it getting missed in a flood of messages and not printed in time. If you want a bit of paper that can be given to someone else at that place and taken away that works. Its rarity even makes it stand out, which is helpful if it's an important form of authorisation (for example).

Fax did get used as if very secure and reliable in e.g. law, finance, and the NHS (where it may still survive). I don't think that was due to anything in the system itself, more that it was a "trusted link" - you knew the other machine was really in the office you thought it was.