Thursday 1 August saw further problems for Manchester Metrolink with a car colliding with a tram on Mosley Street in the morning and then during the evening an overhead line problem on the Bury line.
The first incident saw services suspended in Manchester city centre after a car collided with a tram on Mosley Street. The incident occurred during the mid morning and involved M5000 3040 which suffered damage to the front right edge skirting. As a result of the collision services were running from Rochdale to Victoria, MediaCityUK-Eccles and Altrincham/East Didsbury/Eccles-Cornbrook. Services between Bury and Droylsden ran unaffected. Trams were on the move again through the city centre shortly after 1230.
Then during the evening the overhead came down at Crumpsall causing the Bury line to be suspended until the end of service. 3044 was in the vicinity when the overhead wires came down and was left in situ until engineers could get to the scene to make repairs to the overhead. 3044 was heading towards Bury when the incident happened and the citybound overhead lines were left energised to allow any trams which were stranded between Crumpsall and Bury to return to depot.
Photos of the overhead line being down can be found on the unofficial Manchester Metrolink Blog on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Metrolinkblog.
Yawn, Yawn, Yawn !
The Metrolink was running again for part of today (3rd consecutive day )
because of ……….
1 …..
2……
3……
4…….
you can fill the gaps yourselves.
How can anyone rely on this fiasco of an operator ?
More to the point, how do we ( as passengers ) get it sorted,
now there’s a subject for this blog – Please !
Mike
Frustrating as it is there is little, in fact nothing, the operator could or can do about incidents of the nature of these two. Overhead power lines coming down can happen any time and anywhere. Trams can’t move over to avoid accidents with vehicles driven by people who fail to observe stop signs. I was on a Metrolink tram yesterday and that one was missed by about a half metre when a black cab emerged from the same junction as the tram approached.
By the same token, the operator of this system does get it wrong on plenty of other issues.
Manchester Metrolink is a high profile system and so any little delay always gets reported in the local media (and I guess we are guilty in re-reporting it here). But is it really any worse than other public transport systems in the UK? Go online and I bet you can find people moaning about London Underground, national rail operators, bus services, other tram services because none of them are completely reliable.
There are some delays which are unavoidable to Metrolink and the fatality at Freehold and the car driving into a tram are certainly issues that Metrolink can do nothing about. As a commuter you have to accept that these will happen from time to time and just get on with life. Unfortunately it seems that people just like moaning and accept anything to be perfect.
It is worth recording that the car collision only saw services suspended for about 30 minutes.
Of course Metrolink arranged for a car to collide with a tram, and then pulled a switch to drop the overhead! How silly! More important is the total lack any contingency to keep things running albeit on a reduced basis.
Yes, of the 4 incidents which brought Metrolink to a stop over the last couple of days, one caused by a car driver ignoring illuminated flashing stop signs, job stopped at Freehold on the orders of Greater Manchester police after a person forced a tram driver to end his life for him (putting the safety of passengers on the tram at risk as he chose the middle of the evening peak when there would have been plenty of standing passengers), and a third stoppage in the city centre again on the orders of GM Police due to another attention seeker threatening to jump off the roof of the Arndale – the police were totally non-discriminatory and closed the road as well. Whilst I am no defender of Metrolink incompetence (as regular readers will know!) these 3 incidents were totally outside of their control. And as for contingency plans, in the Arndale incident they kept services running to Piccadilly and Victoria, (services from East Didsbury diverted to Piccadilly), there wasn’t any more they could do. As regards the car / tram collision, the council say it is the 23rd car / tram collision at this junction in 6 years. They say traffic lights cannot be installed there as the rear of a standing double tram would foul an adjacent major junction, although I don’t see why said lights couldn’t be set to change in favour of an approaching tram in time to avoid it being stopped. They are now talking about installing ‘bollards’, by which I presume they mean the type they have on Corporation Street, which rise up under any transgressing vehicle and basically wreck it. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Wrecking renegade cars sounds like an excellent idea. Only problem is Metrolink would need hundreds more trams, hooray, to transport all the disenfranchised motorists!!
I have always been shocked by the number of these Mosley Street incidents, and am horrified that they total twenty-three in six years! I have always felt that traffic signals should have been installed from the outset, and I think that the argument about ‘fouling’ another junction is specious: the lights should be set always to favour the tram, so that it would move swiftly through the junction, and road traffic would be only briefly inconvenienced. The stupidity and selfishness of car-drivers never ceases to amaze!
The amazing thing is that according to the Manchester Evening News report, the council have installed illuminated signs which flash the word STOP when a tram is approaching, yet this car driver still managed to hit a tram! I don’t know which are the worst – car drivers who ignore stop /give way signs or those who stupidly drive onto the tram lines then blame inadequate signage.
Yes agreed this was not of Metrolinks doing, but how they respond to the situation when its happened is how they are judged. Continual use of the 98 and 135 on the Bury line is not the answer. Someone needs to asess the situation as it happens and if not a quick fix ,replacement road transport calling at all stops should be put in place a lot quicker than is now.
If the wires coming down and a tram derailing is beyond their control, then with who does the blame lie. ? Are they responsible for their own infastructure ?
I don’t know anything about a tram derailing, when was this?
The point being made was that 3 out of the 4 incidents mentioned were outside of Metrolink’s control. When it comes to providing replacement buses at short notice, Metrolink are dependent on other operators to provide them as they do not have any buses themselves. And no doubt just as during disruption on the railways the operators are not always able to provide at vehicles or drivers at short notice. Also in the Mosley Street incident, as Gareth says the service was only stopped for about 35 minutes and even with an immediate response it would have taken that long to get replacement vehicles on the road. Plus of course the fact that the replacement buses would not have been able to travel along Mosley Street either as the road was blocked!
In the case of the Arndale incident, the only stops that were not serviced were Shudehill and Market Street, and even with planned engineering work the replacement buses don’t call at those stops. The “wires down” incident happened late in the evening and I think replacement buses would have been well nigh impossible to obtain at that time of day. And was the incident caused by failure of their infrastructure, or due to vandalism? I would actually assume in this case that it was actually infrastructure failure, as they are usually keen to make it known when vandals or cable thieves are to blame.
With regard to contingency plans for an amended service, all I can say is on the Rochdale line, when there is a problem at the Manchester end they do try to operate a service in as far as Central Park: in railway days any problem anywhere on the Oldham branch between Manchester and Shaw usually meant no service at all on the branch.
Just found the news item about the mainline derailment at Queens Road on Saturday (3056). I presume it was crossing over to go onto the depot when the derailment occurred.
The simple and obvious answer would be to close Nicholas street. TfGM want this, GMP want this, RAIB have recommended this! On more than one occasion the council have rejected this. Could it be because Nicholas Street acts as a nice little cut through to the Town Hall…hmmmmm
Hi All,
Please see the message posted todays date ( 5th) on the TfGM
website from Peter Cushing, The Director of Metrolink
(wasn’t he a horror film actor ?)
where he is apologising for the service, or lack of same, over
the last week.( Wednesday till today, Monday) Three instances
are their fault, points, signals etc, so we’ll take away the lunatics
(car driver and woman wanting to jump) but its still not leaving a
rosy picture, not does it address Nigel’s point (above) where
Metrolink continue to leave stranded passengers to fend for them-
selves. (Since when does a half hourly 33 service bus to Eccles,
usually a single decker, manage to accomodate the passengers
carried by tram, when that line goes down, yet that is all that
Metrolink will ever offer advice towards.
Ken,
Tram derailed near Queens rd Saturday afternoon. Ref replacement buses, I have worked on the railways for 7 years now and have not experienced one incident whereby replacement road transport has not been sorted within an hour, perhaps having worked most of Lancashire I have just been lucky.
Ken,the derailment happened on Saturday afternoon at about 1500hrs.I think it involved vehicle 3056 which was returning to queens rd depot out of service from bury.As it was being routed into the depot from signal 39 it derailed blocking both lines.There is a picture of it on the Manchester evening news web site.As you can imagine it caused absolute chaos.Queens rd vehicles ended up going over to old Trafford.As far as I know they managed to run a replacement bus service from crumpsal to Victoria.As you say Ken,it very hard to put in a replacement bus service at such short notice.Bus company do not have a glut of spare drivers just in case.
Its been a really bad week for metrolink,with a rip down,a derailment,one suicide,two attempted suicides and an R.T.A.
A good sign from all the above complaints is that the tram network in Manchester must be very good, MOST of the time. Otherwise people would be so used to a bad service that it becomes expected and therefore not complained about as much. Do you complain about haing to wait for a bus which has not turned up or is late? No? that is because it is expected, and in London some of our buses are more frequent than the underground trains (every 2-5 minutes).
As someone who works for London Underground (admitedly in an office) it often amazes me that people complain of a bad service when they have to wait more than 5 minutes for a train!! Wow, five minutes, you may have to miss your morning cappuccino.
And before I am lynched yes, commuting is a pain, and it is more so when things go wrong. But just to advise you, as an ex-Croydon Tram driver, it will get worse as the system gets bigger and people do not learn to be patient and give way to the tank on rails, as the car user/pedestrian/passeger is guaranteed to lose.