UKC

All trains in Scotland are cancelled in advance of storm Isha. This seems to be happening more frequently (I don't remember it ever happening before say 5 years ago). Not great for encouraging rail travel 

East Midlands removed my girlfriend's train from the timetable without bothering to tell her, pretty indefensible!

Wow is she royalty ! She has her own train. How cool is that?

No she doesn't have her own train. It's pretty clear from the context of what I wrote that it was a publicly accessible East Midlands Rail service which they had removed from the timetable on the day without warning passengers. The next one she tried arrived at Derby only to announce it wouldn't be going any further. The railway needs to be operated in a safe fashion, but that doesn't mean that TOCs should be allowed to use it as an excuse for poor or none existent service. 

One train from Sheffield to London tonight cancelled and the next one driving slow apparently - on what was already due to take 3 hours... Ended up closer to 4. Not sure how we get our infrastructure more able to deal with this now they seem to be so frequent.

Imagine the reaction if Scotrail has run trains and some someone had been killed in an accident caused by a fallen tree.

Dave

Just checking my commute this morning and there are cancellations and delays due to multiple fallen trees. But they are still managing to run trains.

It's clearly possible to still run trains despite a high risk of fallen trees. The cynic in me suspects that they put a bit more effort in when the trains are going to London compared to routes in Scotland.

So what's changed? Is it just lower risk tolerance than previously? (In England, which has comparable or higher winds, speed limits etc seem to be sufficient)

Scotrail have already had people killed after running trains in the wake of heavy overnight rain. Imagine that happened again. Thankless balancing act.

Bad rep if they cancel everything.

Very bad rep when reasonably high chance of chaos develops due to downed trees/flooding etc etc

Extremely bad rep when people die - see Stonehaven

Solution - money

I'm guessing she doesn't travel by train very often? Her experience is shit, but unfortunately it's a completely normal everyday occurrence and IME they don't need the excuse of severe weather to cancel trains without warning. How would they even have warned her? Did she leave contact details when she bought the ticket? 

I would advise anyone travelling by train at any time to check the live status online before travelling. Just turning up at a station xpecting trains to actually run generally leads to disappointment. 

That was mostly due to poor construction than flooding directly. Cancelling everything seems an over reaction to me.

We'll I just read something about there being ten trees down on one stretch of line in Scotland so maybe they made the right call?

It's windy, there's not much that can be done - equally the trains in Denmark are on an alternate timetable today, because of the wind. Equally, the advice is to avoid driving if possible - just because people ignore this doesn't mean the train is "unreliable". Weather happens, and storms will continue to get worse if we carry on the current pathway...

When you buy tickets via an app, they can and sometimes do contact you with updates.

The process is broken though. The apps wont automatically claim for delayed trains. They wont reroute you when a line is blocked. It wont tell you if first class is declassified, due to overcrowding etc. There isnt a real time tracker, that might show you that your train is stationary 50km away.

Its not rocket science. Its lots of competing companies with no interest in working together for a better experience for everyone.

Also, bad rep if they preemptively fell all the trees on their embankments, which are the main risk in high winds.

That major accident during COVID near Aberdeen where the driver was killed (and had there been more than 5 people on board likely tens of passengers would have been too) has made Network Rail Scotland and ScotRail quite risk-averse.  Oddly that doesn't seem to have carried on into England, though admittedly in the South East the storm wasn't quite as bad, I still have my fence and all my wheelie bins!

It was due to poor construction. Well, a poor design exacerbated by channelled flows from a bund, into a filter drain (trench full or rocks) that went down to track level. 

This constructed solution would have gone unnoticed if the storm never happened which leaves a question, how many other comparable examples of poor design/construction exist just waiting to be discovered?

Since this accident happened almost 4 years ago, this is probably why you don't recall trains being cancelled five years ago.

This could have been a lot worse if the train had more than nine people on board.

A lot of them don't belong to the railway anyway but are in neighbouring gardens where the railway can ask nicely but has no legal right to fell.

The UK is in economic decline, one of the inevitable consequences of that is that there is no longer enough wealth to support the infrastructure and welfare programmes of the country. Reduction and degradation of the road and rail facilities is pretty well under way, welfare is at an all time low, food bank use at an all time high, I can't remember the last time I didn't read a negative NHS news story when I opened bbc news.... The list goes on. People in this country need to accept that their present and future involve being poorer, having less things, reduced services and crumbling infrastructure. There is no point in complaining about it.

The UK is in economic decline, one of the inevitable consequences of that is that there is no longer enough wealth to support the infrastructure and welfare programmes of the country. Reduction and degradation of the road and rail facilities is pretty well under way, welfare is at an all time low, food bank use at an all time high, I can't remember the last time I didn't read a negative NHS news story when I opened bbc news.... The list goes on. People in this country need to accept that their present and future involve being poorer, having less things, reduced services and crumbling infrastructure. There is no point in complaining about it.

It was due to construction errors, but even without construction errors a large tree or a landslip occurring naturally could cause the same level of accident.

The railway does tend to do "closing the stable door" a lot.  People have probably noticed them screaming at you to stand behind the yellow line before they close the doors, they never used to, this was because of a legal case on Merseyside where a guard received a prison sentence for dispatching a train with someone leaning on it, who was then killed.

(I have witnessed a similar incident this year also on Merseyrail though, the difference being the person wasn't leaning on the train when it was dispatched but moved over to it afterwards - fortunately it didn't result in him falling underneath, possibly because of it being one of the new trains where the driver can see in cameras what's going on on the platform even after it's started moving, so he stopped until the guy moved - this happened a few times before he stumbled off and fell up the footbridge (!) )

There are lots of real time train tracking apps available. While trains are still crap, at least the information available nowadays makes negotiating them much easier.

No comment either way on the closures, but it did get me wondering about driver assist and AEB systems for trains - radar, lidar, SWIR lights and cameras etc.  

There's a few trees down near me in Glasgow suggesting there will be loads of trees down across the network.

BAsed on a recent journey where train speed was reduced to 20mph due to a "broken windscreen wiper", I don't think they are quite there with such things yet.

Their dispatch process is poor, too; there is (was?) no means to alert the driver once they have pulled away, for instance. The procedure itself is poorly written, and uses terminology that is easily confused.

I looked at this some years ago, researching rail safety technologies. The procedure would have been utterly inadequate as a design spec for an automated process.

I've used the trainline one. Its not great. It will tell you if there is a delay. It wont say, the 09:30 is delayed, but take 09:35 then change at X, will get you in quicker. Dont even mention the super off peak, split fair, peak time and other ticketing nonsense. When an open return from Manchester to London, costs more than a return flight from Manchester to New York, you know something is wrong.

As I said, each company will maximise their profits. But they dont work together to maximise the quality of the service.

The apps just give you the information, you have to work out the routing yourself. To be fair, this is not trivial and I wouldn't expect that level of investment from the train companies. I'd rather see the money go on trains. I actually considered writing something that would take all my possible routes home and work out the best one, but when the trains go to shit there are so many constantly changing variables that it was just way too hard to do and always a gamble which route would work out best.

Ticket pricing is a completely different subject and I agree that it's absolutely insane and appears to be designed to be as opaque as possible with the intention of fleecing customers.

Twice a week, Friday and Sunday, only 2 instances other than this since May, however both indicated ahead of time that the train was cancelled and she was notified of this ahead of time (one flooding, one points failure).

Ticket bought online as an E-ticket so very easy to send her an email or a text warning her ahead of time if they cared about customer service.

She did check in the morning, that's how she found out her train was removed from the timetable, the cancelled train was showing as running 15 minutes before it arrived when they announced it was cancelled. Any other condescending advice to offer?

Having worked on the engineering side of the industry it is always frustrating to see the failings of the corporate/ office side (Drivers, guards and station staff are usually brilliant, customer service departments typically less so).

I expect that there is a single standard API that all of these ticketing apps plug into. It wouldn't be such a huge project, as the API and train location infrastructure is there. The same with refunds for delays. With a little thought, you could add extra features. Such as to voluntarily reroute people at peak times, to reduce congestion, and in return reward that behaviour with dramatically lower fairs.

You get apps such as Rome to Rio, that can link up public transport services across the planet. If they can work out routing details from some obscure location to another, then it can't be that hard with a fixed network of points. The internet does this millions of times per day, in real time, for example.

It is done, in real time, for the roads. The information about train position is there; it's inherent in the signalling system. Some platform information services now tell you where the train is.

It's a matter of will...

Lack of information is well understood to be the primary stressor for rail passengers.

This.

Additionally, there was at least one tree down and one place where overhead power lines were damaged on my short (~5 mile) commuter route into Glasgow this morning, and that was just what I could see from the car. I can't imagine it was any better anywhere else. If they are anticipating that kind of damage, pre-emptively closing everything probably makes it easier for them to carry out inspections and fix damage than it would be otherwise, thus actually getting full service back faster.

How accessible is the data? If we could grab schedules and real-time location information via an API then building a decent statistical model of the network that you could use to run simulations and evaluate routing options seems like the sort of thing that I could imagine "citizen data scientists" doing as a hobby project...

Very accessible - free and (mostly) open.

The incredibly useful realtimetrains.co.uk for instance started as an enthusiast project.

Much of the time trains aren't being driven on line of sight so any technology for spotting such things as fallen trees would need to be able to see round corners.

On the routes I used to work I can think of numerous locations where the limiting point of visibility would be about 50 metres away but my absolute minimum stopping distance would be more like 700 metres. In normal conditions I could still drive at, for example, 100mph in locations such as this because the information I was getting from the signalling system and my "route knowledge" would tell me what's coming up round that next bend.

That's the main reason drivers cannot just go anywhere on the network and can only drive routes they know intimately. It's very different to driving a car where you should always be able to stop in the distance you can see to be clear.

There is nothing that could tell me about a recently fallen tree just out sight. In the past it was just hard luck if you happened to be on the first train of the day after a night of very strong winds. Increasingly now the driver of the first train will be instructed by the signaller to proceed at caution which may be as slow as 10mph at some locations. If they then crash into a fallen tree having been instructed to proceed at caution they will find themselves in deep doggie doos.

I'm not sure what the technological answer is to these sort of circumstances. A rather old solution was to install "trip wires" along the trackside such as Anderson's piano wires which guard against rockfall in the Pass of Brander, whereby breakage of the wire results in signals reverting to danger.

In recent years, tree growth on railway embankments has increased enormously and it is now very common to have bits of tree weighed down by water or snow slapping the windscreen. Obviously tree clearance work would help here but it would be equally sad to lose the lovely linear nature reserves that some routes have become. Maybe a real blitz on the embankments coupled with an obligation to replace with equivalent woodland elsewhere is what's needed. But that would be very costly.

Maybe someone will come up with a really clever technological fix but I'm glad I won't be driving any more trains before my official retirement in a couple of months time.

(Sorry these sort of responses always seem to end up being too long! I've tried to keep things as short as I can)

Thank you  - interesting post.

I dunno - a more optimistic view might be that if enough people complain something might be done to improve things

(though probably UKC isn't the most productive place to do the complaining)

That's exactly to sort of technology I looked at (as mentioned above), plus some fundamental analysis of the problems of vision, resolution, stopping distances, etc.

It's fundamentally very difficult... There was a proposal for a thing called a 'Rail Scout', a lightweight, autonomous vehicle that goes ahead of the train at the stopping distance, scouting for issues. Either it can stop in time, or it is expendable...

The stopping distances for high speed trains were pretty eye-opening. Incidents such as Stonegate, where icy tracks prevented the brakes being  effective, and it only stopped when it reached an uphill track section, even more so...

I can accept train cancellations as a result of or in anticipation of extreme weather. However, the state of passenger rights in those times of disruption is no good. I was due to travel on the 16:52 Edinburgh-London today, but given that trains weren't running across Scotland this morning and there's been huge and widespread disruption, I've made plans to drive instead.

No refund due because the train is actually running. I've instead had to buy a ticket for a wholly new journey, against which I can receive a refund on my original ticket (minus £10 'admin'). I'm not sure it's fair that the passenger foots the cost when they have to abandon their journey because they don't have confidence, quite reasonably, that the railway will be able to deliver.

And then my sleeper train home tomorrow is cancelled, so if I'd taken the train I'd be stuck at the other end, and as I bought the ticket from a different retailer I'm sure it would be seen as completely irrelevant as far as a refund on the first ticket is concerned.

Sorry, I didn't mean to be condescending. I was just sarcastically commenting on the level of optimism displayed in expecting trains to run according to the timetable. 🙂

Thanks for the really detailed reply.

What a terrifying job if you stop and think about it!

You could have trackside obstruction sensors using the same sorts of tech as AEB in locations where visibility << stopping distance and connect them to signals/trains?  Probably cheaper and saner than the pilot-train-drone mentioned up thread.

West Coast Mainline Euston to Scotland was pretty good when we came out of covid. I'd use it reasonably often to go to work in London from The Lakes. It then got increasingly poor. Often trains seriously delayed or cancelled or they wouldn't sell tickets for certain days. 

I went self employed and work locally now rather than commute to London. 

I have no idea how good it is, but there are websites and apps which work out split tickets for you

https://trainsplit.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAwbitBhDIARIsABfFYIInoh-DStsSUYhA9Clxd...

It's not the working out of the routes that's the problem. It's easy enough to work out what all the options are. The challenge is in working out which one will get me home first. If my regular train is delayed, should I divert? The current status might show that an alternative route is better, but experience has taught me that by the time I get onto the alternative train it too is caught up in the delays.

They do work but if a train is late you are stuffed because you haven't got a through ticket.

Almost managed to run trains...The first train from Edinburgh to London was at 12:00 today, then two more hourly trains were cancelled until the line normalised. Annoyingly, they only notifed you 30 mins before departure that the train is cancelled... surely they must have known it sooner.

The train line app offers split save tickets as well

The rail service is still an absolute rip off too.

The 2nd to last time I was on a train in the UK in August 2023 - the train manager actually apologised when the train reached it's destination as the journey was that bad - mainly overcrowded with MANY people having to stand.

The last time I was on a train in October I got a full refund as it was more than 1 hour late.

As for the weather cancellations I think it is all part of the climate agenda. You cannot failed to have notice all the scary words they use these days to describe what used to be 'normal weather for the time of year'. Global boiling (when the temperature is under 25c) Extreme arctic blasts (when there is a bit of wind which pushes the real feel a few degrees below 0c) etc.

Early last year I remember them closing some schools down in the South because of a 'bit of wind' - the next day there were a few twigs around mind . . so who knows, one of them could have poked someone's eye out.

In saying that I am however old enough to remember a train being delayed because of leaves on the track . . . .

But a massive investment. And have you looked at signalling cable thefts from railways...? Or power cable theft (and the Darwin Award candidates...).

As I said, it's not a trivial problem.

Round here they just steal the track!

Jeepers. Steel is relatively cheap. It's bloody desperate, isn't it...?

Network Rail has invested a lot of money in equipment which cleans the rail head, if they don't use it frequently throughout autumn they will still get delays or potential accidents due to black rail. I know it's something that sounds stupid, but leaves getting mulched under 5- 10 ton wheels will result very slippery rails!

They've done it again! Basically no trains for a week!

Worth noting that clearing trees from railway trackside was routine in the days of steam trains. You might have noticed that on certain lines (West highland as an example) trees are all roughly the same size. Apparently this is because the practice continued into the 80s as unions would not accept redundancies. Was told this on the train down from Corrour by an old boy whose job was tree clearing on railways.

Not entirely train related, but I can't let this one slide without comment:

In reply to henwardian:

With you to here...

No. This apathy and acceptance that "things are shit and will just get shitter" is so defeatist. The UK is *easily* wealthy enough to have good things and it's an active, political choice that we don't have them.

We MUST complain about them, do something about them, shout about them, tell your MP whatever. But just grumbling "it's all shit and it'll never get better" somewhat guarantees that it will become so....

sounds like my last two train journeys in Germany - and the response from the passengers was remarkably like that in the U.K.

Silver lining there, when my drive takes an hour longer I get charged more!

This would be a fascinating field to work on.

I think a good solution would be to make a driverless rail drone, relatively low weight, with radar, Lidar, cameras etc to automatically detect debris on the tracks.

In order for it to stop quickly, it could use high friction shoes that can clamp on the track (assuming there is space for this).

The you just run it 10 minutes before the first train whilst remaining in full communication.

Not a cheap solution, but not horrifically expensive either. Initially it could be deployed on a handful of routes where line of sight is poor, but it's a critical route.

yet it was only in the last few years they found out why

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0057 

This is a palpable scam by the rail companies - a late train that was cancel or withdrawn at 10pm the night before doesn't count as a late train and only late trains scheduled to run at 10pm the night before count for compo

See the 'Rail Scout' mentioned above. Sadly, whilst I can find the paper that described it referred to in other papers, the paper itself seems to have vanished from the internet...

Apologies, hadn't spotted that.

Wonder why it never saw the light of day.

It's an obvious solution and it would save lives.

You probably want to look at the statistics for rail accident KSI. They are dominated by slips, trips, falls and 'third party action'. The number of incidents caused by actual rail operations is way down the list. We're well into ALARP considerations.

You said the above, but read the below link, maybe not such a fool proof solution. 

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/the_pub/yesterday_was_a_very_lucky_day-76...

The main Leamside track theft was some time ago now - it was an organised multi-month effort employing genuine sub contractors but I’ve stumbled into a smaller scale theft as well.  On the desperate side, metal drainage grates in the road are going missing locally again.  

I just can’t envisage a tethered drone working; modern sensor suits are so small they they wouldn’t present an inviting target to theft and would be barely noticeable if fixed to existing infrastructure - put them high up on the power gantries on electrified lines and nobody would go near them.  Harder for other lines.

Well, virtually tethered... I couldn't, either.

Fixed infrastructure was also the only viable solution I could imagine. I'll see if I can dig out the report we wrote; it was more than ten years ago, IIRC...

As for no-one touching stuff on power gantries, well, there are a number of cases of cable thieves left charred and dangling...

Found the report. I opened with the observation of KSI causes for 2011/12...

Suicide 238.3

Trespass 54.4

Slips/trips/falls 17.3

PTI 7.7

Trackside workforce 7.7

Level crossings 5.8

Train accidents 0.1

I noted that the fatality rate for suicide & trespass incidents was 88%, which suggested there was little a driver could do.

I suspect those will have improved since, Network Rail were putting a lot of pressure on contractors to improve safety of maintenance operations back in 2020 (I left the industry), particularly hand tools and redundant brake systems on Road Rail Vehicles and they were keen to remove level crossings/ public access to them if at all possible (noting the whole fuss about the Dalwhinnie crossing on here).

I don't think this is quite what you meant about a Rail Scout, but it's used for track inspection tasks:

https://eurailscout.com/

I think that will just be fiddling at the margins; the suicide & trespass are probably largely unchanged. Industrial injury and level crossings were tiny, in comparison (13.5/330).

And, no, it was a different 'rail scout'; it was a Carnegie-Mellon research project proposal that doesn't seem to have got off the ground. Reading the report, it looks like we came up with the idea independently; a fairly obvious idea.

Sorry, I was just giving context of what they are doing in those areas rather than suggesting that was the totality of their accident reduction efforts.

The whole network is like a sieve with so many access points that Trespass can't be prevented, that needs education of the public and removal of incentives (i.e. theft prevention and avoiding footballs on the line).

Suicide prevention efforts have always seemed a bit lackluster in my eyes.

It wasn't intended as a criticism, but a dispassionate, engineering look at the numbers, and where technical solutions might help. And where it was hard to see where they would be able to help: suicide & trespass. There's really very little that could practically be done with technical measures.

Well, apart from platform-side doors for in-station suicides, but those were already being considered to address the PTI incidents.

The engineering work & level crossing incidents were already being addressed at the time of the report.

The other aspect we considered was loss of service. As a result, we went into predictive maintenance... Oh, and to address the 'where is my train' issue, various position determination systems (other than GNSS)...

I remember thinking when I used to commute daily that I'd really like a "smart" alarm clock (before such things were all the rage) which could check the trains and not bother to wake me up if I had no chance of getting into work anyway!

Worse than preemptively cancelling trains due to bad weather was the daily ritual where we'd run on time, only to sit outside our destination for 25 minutes to let all the other late trains in ahead of us, so we could arrive only 29 minutes late and thereby avoiding the 30 minute delay compensation threshold (now lowered).

Have also had the pleasure of being in a carriage which had a tree fall on it, and another one which caught fire. I've been assaulted, witnessed not only fights, but also a man who karate chopped his way across the station trying to get on the first train to run after 3 hours of no-service. I've had to deal with the bureaucracy when your ticket gets swallowed by a machine and lost, and I spent 3 years at one point sitting on the floor in the corridor between carriages... what a wonderful way to travel!

I sometimes wonder if the most obsessive advocates of rail travel in this country have ever truly endured the grinding misery of it.

Alas.

Blimey; that was a long journey...

The frequent delays felt practically interminable!

I also don't recall seeing an Amber wind alert covering practically the entire UK, with gusts up to 107mph recorded at ground level (I believe 160+mph recorded in the hills). I'm not saying that big storms didn't happen before, just that they seem to be happening more frequently, and also that I think the rail network has learned over time that they need to be more proactive in their response in order to protect passengers. I haven't read into whether there were any alternative services provisioned on high-traffic routes, but I would be disappointed if some effort wasn't made there. 

My house is adjacent to a Scotrail line with overhead electric lines, and I wasn't surprised by the lack of trains. There's a high chance of trees collapsing (which seemed to be a pretty frequent occurence this week), and sections of that line are close to to the seafront and prone to being struck by waves during storm conditions. We had 75mph winds here which blew several tiles (including a large ridge tile) off my roof and judging by the number of tradesmen's vans up and down the street this week caused a lot of other damage. I had a straw hedgehog by the front door who is now MIA. 

The first thing I do on waking is check to see if the trains are running, if not I go back to sleep.

I've never been assaulted or been in a carriage hit by a tree, and the only time I've been in a train that caught fire was in Italy, but the rest of your story is all too familiar. I used to take a camping stool to sit on, and I started a bit of a trend. There would be a few regulars all sat in a row on our folding stools.

But for all the expense and misery, commuting by train is still cheaper, quicker and more fun than driving.