Winter in Blackpool traditionally means work on the infrastructure, and this has been true so far of winter 2016/17. Some track repair works on Monday 5th December meant that, for a few hours, single-line working was enforced between North Pier and Cabin. Although only the modern LRT trams were in service that day this still presented some novel riding and photographic opportunities.
Passengers were asked to board trams at Pleasant Street, Wilton Parade, Gynn Square and Cliffs Hotel stops from the northbound platform, as the southbound line was closed whilst under attention. This meant that passengers could ride a service tram over the crossovers at North Pier and Cabin – not so unusual on a heritage car, but extremely unusual on a Flexity!
Prominent notices were posted on board trams and at waiting shelters, with information also provided on Blackpool Transport’s website and online social media. Unfortunately, the disruption seemed much worse than expected; warnings of delays up to ten minutes proved to be somewhat optimistic, with reports stating that some journeys ended up being about an hour late! It is not clear why trams were delayed so heavily due to what should have been a fairly straightforward operation. Thankfully the closure was only for part of the day and by mid-afternoon, a normal full service using both tracks had resumed.
Thanks to Rob Bray for capturing a number of unusual images from this day, showing some of the moves made by the Flexity trams as a result of the single line running, which are reproduced below.
It was a joke the single line working it was far too long to keep to some sort of timetable. It would have been more efficent to run a single tram shuttle between cabin and north pier and do a split service cabin to fleetwood and star gate to north pier yes it would cause an inconvenience still but not half as much as this did. I was driving past central pier at about 1030 and there was 4 northbound trams stacked from north pier stop back to central pier. In my opinion there should be crossover somewhere around hilton or about every half mile or so to better facilitate movements like this.
I’m sure central Government would pay the millions required for the new crossovers for something which may happen once every ten years. We should be grateful a Tram service was provided – in years gone by it would have been cancelled. In the H&S crazy world we live in I would fully expect this move to cause severe delays!
You cannot run a Shuttle Starr Gate to North Pier – it has to be Tower which could have also caused issue.
There never were any other crossovers on this stretch apart from Gynn which was rarely used due to being on a steep gradient.
A single tram shuttle between north pier and cabin still would have been easier
You cannot run a shuttle from Starr gate to North Pier as the stop is too far beyond the points I’m told. However you could run one to Tower.
There was one at Plesant Street too for many years.
Solution is to use a temporary crossover, a bit of a bumpy ride but it’s a solution used it good effect in Brussels and elsewhere
Must be before my time!
i agree re temporary crossovers but we don’t use them in the UK and no one has ever said why!!
The ironic thing is Blackpool used to just insert new crossovers for single line working back in its busiest times and whip them out again afterwards. They haven’t really managed single line working effectively for many years – one silly example was running winter specials on Saturdays during single line. In winter 98/99 we had timecards roughly making a 10 minute service PB-Cleveleys, but there was single line Gynn-Talbot which could only really accommodate one tram each way every 20, so both service and special ran in tandem and the timecard was rather useless.
Pleasant Street came out late 60s from memory.
Found a pic of a portable crossover:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/olaf_wagner/31604506345/in/pool-1105063@N25
Irrespective of crossovers/lack of crossovers etc it is still obvious with delays of up to an hour that a service was being advertised which did not have a chance of being maintained, leading to potential loss of trust with users.
Generally speaking people will accept an amended service if what is advertised works on the day, perhaps a half frequency through service with shuttles either side filling in the gaps. But people sitting on a tram for the best part of an hour longer than advertised is not going to inspire customer confidence, especially if only travelling a relatively short distance such as Pleasure Beach to Bispham.
I haven’t seen anything to suggest unforeseen problems adding to the delay, but with the length of single line section I would say that trying to run a 15 minute frequency service was optimistic to say the least. And as the day goes on the delays would just get longer and longer.