Farce of a rail replacement service

[paulsw2]

The rail replacement between Hammersmith & Acton Town was woefully underbussed yesterday (30 march) on arrival at Hammersmith there was about 500-600 people waiting in a queue no bus in sight about 10 mins later 1 bus arrived I waited over 30 minutes to get on a bus along with a Piccadilly line driver it took almost an hour from arriving at Hammersmith to reach Acton Town. The officials from Metroline seemed to be happy to chat amongst themselves but when asked when the next bus was they didn't have a clue. When the Wimbledon Branch is closed or when the Vic line was upgraded the rail replacement services seemed to have sufficient vehicles to cater for demand but also having spare vehicles available to cater for traffic delays or extra volume of passengers.

[roythebus]

Traffic in London was horrendous yesterday. It was Mothering Sunday and the whole world and its dog seemed to be on the road.

Whilst I wasn't party to what was happening yesterday, I have controlled rail replacements in the past and sometimes they go badly wrong; probably not under-bussed but purely the subject of bad traffic. Possibly even the standby buses were used. That the controllers don't have a clue is probably; when I done that work we never knew where the buses were as we weren't given (and didn't have) the technology then. I doubt if mobile controllers would have that either; a lot may be free-lance, some employees of whoever has the contract.

LUL specify the number of buses in service, the headways and the number of standby buses.

Your comment says it took an hour from Hammersmith to Acton Town; that shows how bad the traffic must have been. Personally I'm sorry you've been delayed.

I've done Heathrow-Ealing Common/Northfields and the big DR closures, Embankment-South Ken and the Wimbledon line. On each of those we actually ran out of buses at times due to traffic delays, and that was with over 60 buses doing the rounds!

[l1group]

I'm on the route of both R/R, and there was large traffic on both A4 and Chiswick High Road, I saw a large queue waiting for two Metroline buses, leading to Route 419 using the stand as the first stop. The local R/R (as opposed to the non-stop one via A4) came in and were immediately mobbed by a small crowd, luckily for two buses, which is unlike the local R/R usually on a Saturday, let alone a Sunday. The normal buses were curtailed - E3 had curtailments to Acton and Hanwell, 190 to Chiswick. It probably didn't help that Chiswick Bridge has reduced capacity due to road works. A4 was bad definitely, Gyrotary system at Hammersmith had some traffic definitely when I went there.

I always know that when there's a closure to the Piccadilly/District at Chiswick etc, there will nearly definitely be big traffic towards Hammersmith during the early afternoon on Chiswick High Road, at least, if not, the whole afternoon (and A4).

[Tomcakes]

I have found the biggest problem with replacement buses lately is the lack of competent, informed and authorised to give out orders, personell from the bus companies. A few closures ago there was a 40 minute gap in the bus service to Barnet (not bad compared to the usual train every 4 minutes), the assistant employed to give out information was useless and could not instruct drivers to change from terminating at Finchley to going through to Barnet. All it needed to be resolved was an inspector (who eventually showed up) to instruct a driver to change his destination - although his subsequent attitude to passengers who were asked to get off due to overcrowding (caused by the lack of buses) was sub-optimal.

[Hassaan]

Don't they always have issues with buses on this section? A significant amount of people prefer using the H91 to get to the other side, which also serves all the stations up to Chiswick Park, Osterley/Hounslow West, the bonus station of Gunnersbury and passing pretty close to the other stations between South Ealing and Hounslow West. Chiswick High Road is notorious for traffic anyway even without the closures. What didn't help on Sunday was the closure of SWT nearby (no service Barnes Bridge-Hounslow) although it is pretty useless anyway on Sundays with the hourly frequency. I decided to avoid the fun and games when going to East London by using Heathrow Connect from Southall rather than the H91 to Hammersmith.

Tomcakes, Would that be Metroline by any chance? Their drivers are notorious for being rude, in fact they didn't even hide this poster in their Holloway Garage on last year's open day about the poor results of a passenger survey.

[roythebus]

Another problem is that London runs out of buses every weekend, hence the need to sub-contract to operators from outside the area. when I ran my bus company in Mitcham, we covered the whole of the south east; draw a line fro London to Margate, round the coast to Southampton, back up to Reading, High Wycombe, Northampton, Peterborough, Kings Lynn, Colchester, Southend and back to London plus most of the underground..it's quite a big area to cover and I've personally done them all. during the 2000 floods some of us were away from base over a week covering the south coast.

Drivers too come from all over and rarely have enough time to do any form of route learning, controllers come from literally all over the country. Nobody can know every local bus route everywhere.

Don't keep knocking the rail replacement buses.

[Deleted]

I think I had best reply to this one in two parts (with Hammersmith one later!). This first part aims to answer Tomcakes comment about the Northern line.

We currently have the contract for the Barnet Branch, so it falls in my area of responsibility. When the Northern Line re-signalling commenced we were busing people from the Barnet branch to Golders Green. This worked fairly well. However we have no stand space at Golders Green (buses cannot even wait for time as they block other buses) and the stand space at High Barnet is very limited, which makes service regularity difficult. Its also means that you cannot build in additional capacity as this eats up further scarce stand space. But despite this, the Barnet – Golders operation went like clockwork.

However there are occasions when we either cannot go to Golders Green or the line is knocked out to Archway. In this case we have to run through Finchley Central to Archway. The latter (and sometimes the former!) suffer from unpredictable traffic conditions. This means that one weekend you have early running buses, and the next your service is running horrendously late. I think the last couple of occasions we have done the Archway job, we had problems with parked cars in East End Lane, football at Arsenal, and a house fire on line of route in Finchley.

Luckily when the service is running well we have a fair amount of space to play with at Finchley Central car park which means the reversers can lay over happily. However on the last couple of jobs, LUL have needed most of the car park for Pway, which has reduced our layover capacity.

In fairness to TfL/London Buses they will notify us in advance of any service impacts, and if they feel fit will agree increases in PVR or standby vehicles (providing we can find somewhere for them to park up of course). However this does not help when you have unplanned events which disrupt the service. Of course with higher PVR’s, longer recovery and more stand space we could absorb most of this late running. But there are considerable cost pressures faced by LUL and others, and even if we could find space for these buses, it would be difficult to justify that additional spending in today’s climate.

So to the issue of supervision. The guys and girls you see wearing blue jackets at bus stops are not my staff (or indeed working in any supervisory capacity). They are customer information assistants which are employed directly by LUL. Their role is not to get involved with managing the bus service. Our supervisors at Archway are on the stand which is behind the station, trying to regulate the service and not clog up what minimal space we have in the bus station.

However as we discovered, the supervisors are blind to what’s going on outside Archway station. They are happily dispatching buses from around the corner with no idea of the waiting queue outside the station. And as we have found out, they cannot see the Archway gyratory which has on a couple of occasions gridlocked due to minor accidents on the roundabout. As a result TfL have agreed to pay us for additional bus supervisors to work nearer the departure stops.

Of course what you tend to get is one bus meeting the arriving passengers and the next arriving at an empty departure stop. So the second bus heads off lightly loaded. So with the additional supervisors we have held buses for a few minutes at the departure stop to try to keep some form of regularity and to match the service to arriving passengers. I have also visited Archway and watched covertly to ensure this was happening. However some buses are faster than others, and those with a quick empty bus soon catch up the slow full buses. Just the same as the railway in that respect.

Almost lastly, when we have subcontracting we try to keep the ‘subbies’ as we call them, on the short haul. As Roy has pointed out, specialist rail replacement operators generally have drivers who are happy to venture into new territory. However this does not apply to all drivers. And due to the way in which overtime is allocated in the big groups, you cannot guarantee that the person who turns up will have any knowledge of the area. So we try to concentrate them on the short haul, leaving our drivers to do the longer more complicated runs.

To help unfamiliar drivers we have ‘navigators’ (or Pilots in TfL speak) who show unfamiliar drivers around. There is limited resource for this function, but we do have a few around to help. Regardless of this some drivers really do struggle despite having maps, excellent signage, and someone showing them around! But as I say we cannot dictate what we get from the major groups.

Very finally, there’s the issue of drivers hours. We always tender on fully legal duties which comply with UK Domestic driving regulations. We do not use aggregate breaks, as all drivers have a minimum fixed 40 min break, with many having far beyond this. The more risky the job, the more I tend to increase the breaks. However theres a risk that if your buses start to run horrendously late, you start to run up against running potentially illegal drivers hours. Thats not something we want to do. So the supervisor needs to keep a weather eye on his drivers breaks. Unlike mainstream bus services, if your rail heading between two truncated services, curtailment is not an option. So if we cannot curtail buses we lose complete trips. Of course we try not to let this impact on the service, but its sods-law that it happens at the worst part of the day. Likewise with subbies you cannot reform the service, as if we took a Metroline driver off we could not put one of our drivers in their bus. So you end up with a driver laying over for 40 mins, sometimes in an inconvenient location.

It is a very big subject, worthy of a book! Hope this helps with some of the points. I will do the Hammersmith one later.

[Deleted]

Part two

Due to the nature of this job, I am going to be careful so as not tread on anyone’s toes. Understandably there’s some degree of focus on this one. So if I talk in round terms hopefully you will understand why.

This weekend there were four contractors involved. Service A (Hammersmith – Ealing Broadway) was with Arriva London, Tower Transit had service B which ran Hammersmith – Gunnersbury/Richmond, Metroline were doing service C which was the fast service between Hammersmith & Acton Town. Lastly we had a smaller job (service D) running between Ealing Common & Northfields. Excluding standby buses this job needed roughly 50 buses at its peak.

From previous experience, this area is very challenging to say the least. You have a busy gyratory at Hammersmith and an unpredictable roundabout at Gunnersbury. And as others have pointed out there’s roadwork’s and other issues in the area which can all conspire to put a pretty big spanner in the works.

Perhaps best start with the planning – In general terms LUL & London Buses produce the timetables of which bus operators are required to tender against. The running times are created using a mix of different factors. Firstly long before the closure is tendered, the route is surveyed using the type of bus intended. This will note any difficult turns, low structures, parking restrictions needed and so on. At the same time the running times are analysed. Secondly TfL will compare those times with known running times on parallel bus services and then mix that in with experience of other closures. Thus we end up with a variety of running times intended to suit the different times of the traffic day. Operators then tender in good faith on this basis.

The problem is that you can trial run the odd bus here and there, but you cannot replicate what happens when you drop another 50 buses on to an already overcrowded road network. Furthermore until the actual day you will have little or no idea how long it would take to load & unload each bus. Of course with Piccadilly line closures you have the addition of luggage to consider. And most people want to stay with their luggage, so unless you handle the loading carefully, a double decker bus could end up losing half its capacity as customers block the lower deck isles and refuse to risk dragging their luggage up the staircase.

Furthermore as we have found in the past, the Piccadilly line has some very unusual peak flows. It’s can be manic at start and finish of the day and oddly quiet at other times. Obviously the loadings are dictated by arrivals and departures of flights at Heathrow, and this can vary week on week.

So if we go back to the planning. As we all know LUL will try to encourage customers to use alternative routes. Occasionally this may seem illogical, but its better to keep passengers on the network for as long as possible, and keep the bus trip as short as possible. This means that LUL will look to parallel lines when planning services. Theres a few of these, but for example the Bakerloo is fairly close to the Met & Jubilee at Wembley, the Centrals stations at Stratford & Newbury Park are very good for east end District closures. And in this case Ealing Broadway is ideal for the Piccadilly Line at Northfields.

LUL will also hope that some people will use other mainline and local buses, or simply not travel in that area at all. So a calculation is made on the basis that there will be some loss of footfall. That’s all very good assuming customers listen to (or understand) that message. If you put on a “fast bus” service, customers will flock to that as they will incorrectly assume this is better than the alternatives being offered. When that happens we experience overloading.

However as we have seen, with multiple closures customers do start to try alternatives. And as time grinds by, the numbers using the buses diminish. We experienced this on the Central line when I worked there as a Manager in the mid 90’s. The first weekend we ran buses between Leytonstone & Bethnal Green the service was heavily overloaded, which prompted the operator (at that time Capital Citybus) to approach me for funding for extra buses. However by week 17 we could have ran half the service. When we restarted the trains, the numbers of passengers had fallen so dramatically, our Sundays on the east of the Central looked more like Boxing Day. The same happened on the Jubilee line.  So there is a seismic shift as time goes on, its just very difficult to get it to work on the “one weekend wonders”.

However bussing everyone is not normally an option. And there are many good reasons for this. Firstly London is a very compact place. Stand & stop space is very limited. In Central London between the Circle line we stopped doing rail replacements in this part of the world years ago. Part of this was because the bus network has capacity for the extra passengers, and secondly we clog up busy streets with our railway replacement buses. I remember doing one Marble Arch – White City job in the mid 90s where the crowd at Marble Arch became so large they spilled out into the road and we lost one of the two carriageways on the approach to Marble Arch roundabout. This meant our buses were loading in lane 2, and while doing so nothing could get round us. Thus Oxford Street and Baker Street came to a halt. It’s not something we can get away with these days.

Having seen a number of pictures from last weekends operations, I can confirm that Metroline had their best staff on it. One of their regulators was a very experienced chap with many years of bus scheduling experience. However despite this the job still fell over. This says to me that the fault (if there is any) does not lay with any one particular organisation. We just have to get together and learn from it (and hope the passengers have too!) and move on to the next one.

[John Tuthill]

Apr 2, 2014 12:12:00 GMT deansullivan said:

Part two

Due to the nature of this job, I am going to be careful so as not tread on anyone’s toes. Understandably there’s some degree of focus on this one. So if I talk in round terms hopefully you will understand why.

This weekend there were four contractors involved. Service A (Hammersmith – Ealing Broadway) was with Arriva London, Tower Transit had service B which ran Hammersmith – Gunnersbury/Richmond, Metroline were doing service C which was the fast service between Hammersmith & Acton Town. Lastly we had a smaller job (service D) running between Ealing Common & Northfields. Excluding standby buses this job needed roughly 50 buses at its peak.

From previous experience, this area is very challenging to say the least. You have a busy gyratory at Hammersmith and an unpredictable roundabout at Gunnersbury. And as others have pointed out there’s roadwork’s and other issues in the area which can all conspire to put a pretty big spanner in the works.

Perhaps best start with the planning – In general terms LUL & London Buses produce the timetables of which bus operators are required to tender against. The running times are created using a mix of different factors. Firstly long before the closure is tendered, the route is surveyed using the type of bus intended. This will note any difficult turns, low structures, parking restrictions needed and so on. At the same time the running times are analysed. Secondly TfL will compare those times with known running times on parallel bus services and then mix that in with experience of other closures. Thus we end up with a variety of running times intended to suit the different times of the traffic day. Operators then tender in good faith on this basis.

The problem is that you can trial run the odd bus here and there, but you cannot replicate what happens when you drop another 50 buses on to an already overcrowded road network. Furthermore until the actual day you will have little or no idea how long it would take to load & unload each bus. Of course with Piccadilly line closures you have the addition of luggage to consider. And most people want to stay with their luggage, so unless you handle the loading carefully, a double decker bus could end up losing half its capacity as customers block the lower deck isles and refuse to risk dragging their luggage up the staircase.

Furthermore as we have found in the past, the Piccadilly line has some very unusual peak flows. It’s can be manic at start and finish of the day and oddly quiet at other times. Obviously the loadings are dictated by arrivals and departures of flights at Heathrow, and this can vary week on week.

So if we go back to the planning. As we all know LUL will try to encourage customers to use alternative routes. Occasionally this may seem illogical, but its better to keep passengers on the network for as long as possible, and keep the bus trip as short as possible. This means that LUL will look to parallel lines when planning services. Theres a few of these, but for example the Bakerloo is fairly close to the Met & Jubilee at Wembley, the Centrals stations at Stratford & Newbury Park are very good for east end District closures. And in this case Ealing Broadway is ideal for the Piccadilly Line at Northfields.

LUL will also hope that some people will use other mainline and local buses, or simply not travel in that area at all. So a calculation is made on the basis that there will be some loss of footfall. That’s all very good assuming customers listen to (or understand) that message. If you put on a “fast bus” service, customers will flock to that as they will incorrectly assume this is better than the alternatives being offered. When that happens we experience overloading.

However as we have seen, with multiple closures customers do start to try alternatives. And as time grinds by, the numbers using the buses diminish. We experienced this on the Central line when I worked there as a Manager in the mid 90’s. The first weekend we ran buses between Leytonstone & Bethnal Green the service was heavily overloaded, which prompted the operator (at that time Capital Citybus) to approach me for funding for extra buses. However by week 17 we could have ran half the service. When we restarted the trains, the numbers of passengers had fallen so dramatically, our Sundays on the east of the Central looked more like Boxing Day. The same happened on the Jubilee line.  So there is a seismic shift as time goes on, its just very difficult to get it to work on the “one weekend wonders”.

However bussing everyone is not normally an option. And there are many good reasons for this. Firstly London is a very compact place. Stand & stop space is very limited. In Central London between the Circle line we stopped doing rail replacements in this part of the world years ago. Part of this was because the bus network has capacity for the extra passengers, and secondly we clog up busy streets with our railway replacement buses. I remember doing one Marble Arch – White City job in the mid 90s where the crowd at Marble Arch became so large they spilled out into the road and we lost one of the two carriageways on the approach to Marble Arch roundabout. This meant our buses were loading in lane 2, and while doing so nothing could get round us. Thus Oxford Street and Baker Street came to a halt. It’s not something we can get away with these days.

Having seen a number of pictures from last weekends operations, I can confirm that Metroline had their best staff on it. One of their regulators was a very experienced chap with many years of bus scheduling experience. However despite this the job still fell over. This says to me that the fault (if there is any) does not lay with any one particular organisation. We just have to get together and learn from it (and hope the passengers have too!) and move on to the next one.

Dean,
Many thanks for your illuminating posts, maybe TFL should give hard copies to anyone queuing for a RR bus

[Tomcakes]

Hi Dean,

Many thanks for your comprehensive reply!

I had noticed that the railway replacement on the Barnet branch appears to be yourselves and Metroline on a roughly 50/50 basis. As an aside, some time ago they ran a replacement service from Archway to Finchley and then a separate service from Arnos to Barnet - no use if you wish to travel the length of the line, although I suppose they would wish you to catch a service 263 bus.

So to the issue of supervision. The guys and girls you see wearing blue jackets at bus stops are not my staff (or indeed working in any supervisory capacity). They are customer information assistants which are employed directly by LUL. Their role is not to get involved with managing the bus service.

I think this is/was the main problem - the attendant on the street presumably has no control, although I would assume they have a phone number or similar to call a control room if there are problems.

Our supervisors at Archway are on the stand which is behind the station, trying to regulate the service and not clog up what minimal space we have in the bus station.

However as we discovered, the supervisors are blind to what’s going on outside Archway station. They are happily dispatching buses from around the corner with no idea of the waiting queue outside the station. And as we have found out, they cannot see the Archway gyratory which has on a couple of occasions gridlocked due to minor accidents on the roundabout. As a result TfL have agreed to pay us for additional bus supervisors to work nearer the departure stops.

Of course what you tend to get is one bus meeting the arriving passengers and the next arriving at an empty departure stop. So the second bus heads off lightly loaded. So with the additional supervisors we have held buses for a few minutes at the departure stop to try to keep some form of regularity and to match the service to arriving passengers. I have also visited Archway and watched covertly to ensure this was happening. However some buses are faster than others, and those with a quick empty bus soon catch up the slow full buses. Just the same as the railway in that respect.

Aha - hopefully this will improve matters! Granted it's probably difficult to "work blind" with a stand remote from the stop. Presumably with two supervisors, the one at the station can radio or phone through to the one up top to dispatch another bus, or re-form one.

Almost lastly, when we have subcontracting we try to keep the ‘subbies’ as we call them, on the short haul. As Roy has pointed out, specialist rail replacement operators generally have drivers who are happy to venture into new territory. However this does not apply to all drivers. And due to the way in which overtime is allocated in the big groups, you cannot guarantee that the person who turns up will have any knowledge of the area. So we try to concentrate them on the short haul, leaving our drivers to do the longer more complicated runs.

I didn't realise that this happened - though I know that the likes of Metroline and FirstBus will drag in vehicles from other depots, I didn't realise that operators sub-contracted to each other. In a way it's more frustrating when Metroline cock up - they have the benefit of a depot at Archway for layovers/changeovers etc. I suppose that they wouldn't use a plug bus from their "stage carriage" operations on a replacement service, though. I have also experienced problems with vehicles which are either not mechanically fit, or simply not appropriate for long-distance work, which are chugging along at 20-30mph on an empty dual carriageway! Not from your company I have to say - although I was nearly thrown from my seat by a Volvo with an extremely iffy gearbox!

So the supervisor needs to keep a weather eye on his drivers breaks. Unlike mainstream bus services, if your rail heading between two truncated services, curtailment is not an option. So if we cannot curtail buses we lose complete trips.

Ironically, this has helped before - where a driver has pointed out that he was due his tea break and it was pointless for him to run empty up to Barnet from Finchley, when he could do so in service.

I think the main problems experienced (other than traffic which is outwith anyone's control) are with supervision, or lack thereof, but it's good to hear that that has been sorted. Many thanks for your considered and comprehensive reply!

[greenpark]

Having sat on a rail replacement bus Hammersmith-Acton Town for an hour that weekend I would add that the problem seemed to me that the Chiswick Roundabout got gummed up by traffic being slow to leave southbound. I would have thought that the traffic lights' system would spot that and give longer greens at the Kew Bridge junction, but it doesn't. A bit of traffic control from a copper would also have been helpful. TfL obviously need some better block signalling!

[railtechnician]

A most excellent and very comprehensive explanation of the finer points of Rail Replacement Bus Services from Dean.

It occurs to me that parts of the capital get closed for the marathon, trooping of the colour and similar events throughout the year.

I would've thought that when planning rail replacement services for major railway projects at weekends, consideration would be given by TfL to closing any and all necessary routes to all but public transport and emergency services and similarly suspending parking along those routes.

[Chris M]

It isn't quite as simple as that. If a road is to be closed for a planned event more than once in a year* then it needs the approval of the secretary of state. In practice this is almost always just a rubber-stamp by a civil servant, but it is a requirement.

I think temporarily making a route public transport only would require the publication of plans with the opportunity for public objection that, if any were received, would require assessing.

None of this means it would be impossible to do, but it isn't just a matter of turning up in the morning and closing the road.


*I can't remember whether it is a calendar year or any 12 month period.

[Deleted]

Railtec, we can get parking restrictions. In fact this is quite common and can be obtained quite easily by TfL from the local authority. But its is not without its controversies. A few years back we were doing a job out of Baker Street and needed stand space. So TfL arranged for a parking suspension of various metered bays in Baker Street. But there was a space of about a cars length in the middle of these bays. Westminster refused to suspend the yellow line as different regulations applied. So we had a gap in the middle of the stand, where if we parked a bus over it, we could have received a ticket.
Unfortunately, it also meant that when the yellow line suspension finished anyone could park there. And one angry trader did just that on a weekly basis!
He would watch from his shop, and as soon as the clock ticked 18:30 on Saturday evening, if we had not moved a bus over it, he would move his car into the space. We were then stuck trying to maneuver the buses around his car. So we tried to always ensure a bus was there, for as long as we could. But if for any reason we ran out of buses on the stand, he would gazump the space.
He also wrote several complaints to his local MP. As a result we were moved to Gloucester Place.