TRAIN company London Midland’s launch of extra and newly time-tabled services on modernised West Coast routes were marred by a large number of train cancellations caused by staff sickness, and by a technical problem on one of the company’s electric trains.
High levels of staff absence at some of the company’s train crew bases led to the cancellation of “a large number” of Birmingham to Liverpool services and there were also problems on the southern end of the route into and out of Euston.
At one stage, performance figures showed that only 75 per cent of services on West Coast routes were arriving right time and a company spokesman admitted that the number of cancellations had been “too high”.
The spokesman said that the company was continuing to recruit and train new crew members – drivers and senior conductors – to ensure that manpower levels remained at the right level.
He added that staff were still getting used to the routes and working patterns on new services operating on the Trent Valley line from Crewe to Euston. “This has caused some short-term logistical and resourcing problems,” he said.
More problems were caused when an eight-car London Midland Desiro train left Euston on the evening of 23 December then suffered technical problems on a vacuum circuit breaker which led to a power failure. The service was later cancelled and passengers left the train at Hemel Hempstead.
But it was a different story for Virgin Trains which launched its VHF – Virgin High Frequency – service with three trains an hour between London, Manchester and Birmingham.
The new services encountered a faltering start on Monday 15 December with several early-morning trains cancelled or delayed due to a ‘power blip’ affecting signalling at Bletchley and a track circuit failure at Willesden in north-west London.
But after the initial problems the new timetable showed positive benefits, with many trains reaching their destinations on time or early for much of the rest of the day – although a signalling problem at Long Buckby caused some delays.
The new timetable – based on 125mph running for much of the route – proved to be resilient despite an increase of up to 50 per cent in the number of trains run compared with the week before.
Later, Virgin Trains described the first week of the new timetable as “mixed”, but morning business trains achieved 100 per cent punctuality on Thursday 18 December and, on four out of five days, evening business trains achieved from 90 to 100 per cent.
During the first week in which PPM – Passenger Performance Monitor – reached 80 per cent, performance against an internal target of 85.6 per cent was 86.9 per cent on 16 December and 88.1 per cent the following day.
