This morning saw a number of news headlines about a somewhat
chaotic rail replacement bus operation by Southern Railway yesterday (Sunday 25
February) afternoon. Despite the multitude
of rail routes to and through Gatwick Airport, Network Rail and Southern agreed
to close all of them, instead diverting would-be airport customers to Redhill,
and from there operating rail replacement buses.
As this article in the Evening
Standard, or this one on the BBC show,
it did not go well. All show hundreds, probably
thousands of customers waiting on the forecourt of Redhill station for a rail
replacement bus service (RRBS) to the airport.
The articles also highlight the fact customers could not move through
the station, highlighting concerns about the safety of queuing on stairs.
Victoria, Gatwick Airport and Brighton are on the heavily trafficked Brighton Main Line, which has a very high frequency
train service. As an airport Gatwick
defies all convention on demand for travel: conventional peaks are an irrelevance
as high levels of airport demand exist throughout the whole day. The rise of airlines
such as Ryanair, Wizz Air and EasyJet seeking higher aircraft utilisation
levels means there are no quiet times on the rail links to airports. In the case of Gatwick, between 0900 and 1000
on a Sunday morning, a time when many rail routes are just waking up, there are
usually thirteen trains between central London and Gatwick Airport, of which I expect
most will be formed of between eight and twelve carriages.
During the current weekend works which cut off Gatwick
Airport, that thirteen trains drops to just four between London Victoria and
Redhill. These four trains leave
Victoria at xx00, xx02, xx30 and xx32 past the hour. Operational convenience of ‘flighting’
stopping trains behind fast trains takes precedence over customer service. It is reasonable to assume that the four
trains will all be formed of twelve car Class 377 Electrostar trains. With such a low frequency I’d consider it
beyond comprehension that anything shorter would be operated.
Class 377s do not lend themselves to standing capacity or
airport traffic, but Southern can only operate the trains they have. However they do have 798 seats,
so let’s assume that each train is capable of holding 1,000 passengers
including standees (I am sure many more are possible but airport passengers
also have encumbrances such as luggage which takes up room). Two of the four trains from Victoria to
Redhill, the ones at xx02 and xx32 have some intermediate stops which will have
some level of demand, so let’s assume each of those carries 500 passengers
wanting Gatwick Airport. That’s 3,000
passengers per hour.
Southern stated that they were operating an RRBS bus every
five minutes from Redhill to Gatwick Airport.
A check of this
weekend’s timetable shows that is indeed the case, with each journey taking
23 minutes, as well as an additional half hourly service taking 35 minutes presumably
via Horley or somesuch. The photographs
in the press articles show the majority of RRBS services being operated by double-deck
buses, for which a capacity of 80 passengers can be assumed. However, remember airport passengers are more
than averagely encumbered, and have a preference to not be separated from their
luggage, so 80 is rarely achieved: my personal experience says 50 is about the
best that can be achieved in these circumstances, as some seating is lost to
luggage storage. If coaches are used,
they typically have a capacity of 50 also.
On coaches customer luggage is places in lockers below the passenger
saloon so being separated from luggage is the norm.
The capacity on the rail replacement bus service, whether
buses or coaches, is therefore 50 per vehicle at 12 vehicles per hour, total
600. You do the math!
The every five minute service is inappropriate for this
demand. If customers arrive randomly, then
a frequent service is appropriate.
However in this instance customers were not arriving randomly: they were
arriving on a train with an arrival time that is known to Southern Railway. It’s not ‘dribs and drabs’, it is potentially
one thousand people arriving at once. So
rather than a service ‘every five minutes’ it actually needs a line-up of 20
vehicles to meet the train, and the ability to safely queue customers and load
vehicles as quickly as possible, and for them all to be gone before the whole
process repeats itself when the next train arrives.
This brings us to queuing on stairs. The fact that one arriving train will
disgorge a thousand passengers was also known to Southern. It seems that there was no, or ineffective,
planning for handling those customers.
It is important to remember that not only are the encumbered with
luggage, family, children, etc, they also have no desire to be in Redhill, are
not familiar with Redhill, will be stressing about their flight departure time,
and may not have English as their first language. Luggage, stairs, queues, stress is the recipe
for exactly the behaviours reported, with people pushing others out the way to
get on to RRBS vehicles.
North of the river, great swathes of the Abellio Greater
Anglia network were closed last weekend, with customers being advised to travel
by Tube to Newbury Park station, and from there replacement buses would operate
to points east. Whilst this operation
has been going on for several months, it is a very slick process that guides
customers from the Tube to one of four replacement buses, helped by plenty of
staff from Abellio’s train and bus operations keeping customers informed and
safe.
 |
| Well organised (if numerically questionable) rail replacement bus service at Newbury Park |
I have my suspicions why this [latest] almighty cock up occurred at
Southern, and it’s for much the same reasons as other things go wrong on train
operators. But I hope that in the fullness of time Southern will be answerable
to their paymasters, customers and stakeholders on why such an issue occurred, and
are rapidly learning from it for this weekend.