The pandemic has shown us that change is often forced upon us at short notice and you better always have a plan B (and probably through to a plan Z) as nothing can be taken for granted.
We understand that short term changes to trains timetables are inevitable with more people are back to working from home and more staff will need to isolate (hopefully this is easing now) but there is a big difference between proper planning and bodging it.
Chief of the timetable bodgers appears to be GTR, the umbrella company of Southern, Thameslink and Great Northern. Having found itself short of staff and not planned a proper timetable for this eventuality, it decided just keep on running the special engineering work timetable which had been in place over Christmas. Being designed for a holiday period and a time when one of its major terminals was closed, this missed out key commuter and school trains and initially saw some station entirely closed despite the engineering work being finished. This approach feels lazy and disrespectful to the passengers they carry. We have been approached by members about two specific impacts of this on the Tonbridge-Redhill line:
- Early morning services must be resumed – key workers are unable to get to their jobs on time. The first service from Edenbridge to Tonbridge on a weekday is 06:42
- School traffic – this line is incredibly popular for schoolchildren and giving an option of just one poorly timed train in the morning when infection risk is high is just daft. The super frustrating thing is that GTR recognise this the other way and added an additional train at 16:17 to go with the 16:01 and the 17:01, but failed to properly update travel systems. Even GTR staff were unable to say whether the service was running. What a shambles – though after our intervention we are pleased to see the 16:17 is now properly showing in the passenger information systems.
The latest we have heard from GTR that its ‘temporary’ bodge timetable will likely last until mid-late February and that in itself is a bodge to get through to May 2022.
The contrast between GTR and Southeastern is stark. While Southeastern introduced cuts near the start of January, it only amounted to 7% of its trains overall. The times first and last trains were unaffected and school trains left alone. True, the withdrawal of direct trains to and from Cannon Street is a nuisance, but Southeastern promises that all trains withdrawn in early January will be restored by 31 January. Our main gripe with Southeastern about their continuing failure to consult and be amenable to feedback. We recognise that full consultation cannot happen in these circumstances but with planners and management under a lot of pressure, but the example of GTR shows all too clearly what can happen when managers head to the bunkers and adopt plans that lack logic. While we hope the pandemic will spring no more nasty surprises, there is no excuse for lack of planning and we’ll continue to press our train operators to do better.