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Comment by kiwijamo | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see a post mortem made public. Also fairly well written for laymen while still retaining detail. Most rail infrastructure operators from other countries don’t make this sort of info public (apart from PR type messages which typically don’t explain the issue at at all and are more focused on deflecting blame etc). Kudos to Network Rail.

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Cynical me: The UK railway system has plenty of practice of delays and cancellations, it seems they have learned to at least provide some detail in "lay" form.

Practical me: Having that information allows better decisions to be made. Rather than simply wasting my evening at a station other arrangements can be made, possibly having a meal in a local bar/restaurant rather than shivering on a station.

One of the things I've really liked about my local commuter rail (Virginia Railway Express [0]) is the level of detail and communication they have with the community/riders. Their RSS feed typically has a post if there's any delay over 10 minutes explaining the delay and how long it is expected to be. They'll also post when the GPS tracking for a train isn't working but is still on schedule. The after-incident reports are also really nice; this one [1] resulted in delays of over an hour and a half because of track slippage leaving a station. Since then VRE has been letting us (riders) know if they're reversing the engine placement to mitigate possible slippage, so we're able to see that they're actually implementing the changes they propose. Other disruptions are also communicated fairly clearly and promptly [2]. As a side note, I'm pleasantly surprised by the transparency with historical service levels [3] and passenger utilization [4].

Saying all this though, the level of service is low when compared to other countries' commuter rail systems. One of the challenges VRE works with is that it hasn't owned the rail lines it's running on; they're owned by a freight railroad and passenger rail is typically run at a lower priority than freight. There has been some recent movement though by the state [5] to significantly improve passenger rail transit, especially in the northern part of the state (almost certainly related to Amazon HQ2).

0: https://www.vre.org/

1: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/VAVRE/bulletins/26a...

2: https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/VAVRE/bulletins/26f...

3: https://www.vre.org/service/daily-performance/

4: https://www.vre.org/service/rider/train-utilization-trends/ (not actually trends)

5: https://www.governor.virginia.gov/newsroom/all-releases/2019...

>Kudos to Network Rail.

This kind of jingoistic comment demonstrates how a tactical post with some technical information, can massively skew judgement. According to Network Rail, the routes in question are not only one of the most congested in the country, but have been mired with problems of under-investment and lack of desire to ease the bottleneck. Some of the routes connect salubrious stock-broker belts with the City of London, in addition to Brighton & Hove, East Sussex. Other routes traversing East Croydon, acting as a hub, also serve the mainline stations of London Victoria and London Bridge to (London) Gatwick ─ the second busiest airport in the country.

I wonder how many people will be forgiving or cheering for Network Rail and handing out accolades for their neatly constructed blogs, when they miss their flight or arrive to work late 'due to signalling problems'.

Part 1:https://www.networkrail.co.uk/news/strong-support-for-propos...

Part 2:https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/our-routes...

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