Early Doors

Since the timetable change in December, my normal train in the morning leaves one minute later – at 0642 instead of 0641 – and arrives at Ashford two minutes later at 0656 instead of 0654.   Beyond Ashford there has been no change.   It also leaves Ramsgate 2 minutes earlier, at 0608 instead of 0610.

The 0641 was never a brilliant timekeeper, always two or three minutes late for no greatly apparent reason.   Not that the platform indicators would admit as much – always showing the train as running ‘on time’ whenever it actually left.

So the group of half a dozen us regulars would always be seen huddled around the various apps we have on our smartphones, comparing predictions as to how late the train would be today.   Somewhat surprisingly, they didn’t all match.   It didn’t really matter because the 3 minutes wait the train was scheduled for at Ashford, combined with an on-going schedule that is hardly challenging meant that the degree of lateness (if any) arriving at London Bridge bore little relationship to the degree of lateness arriving at Ashford.

Nevertheless, the new timetable promised the chance that the train would be more on time than in the past and this must, on principle, be a good thing.

And so it has turned out in practice.   We still all hudle around our apps because we don’t trust the platform indicator, but (more by chance than anything else) the indicator’s usual display of ‘on time’ has been shown to be more foten accurate.

The huddling around apps has, however, shown something else.   While our departure is now more usually actually on time, the usual departure time from Minster is shown as 2 or 3 minutes early, while the departure from Sturry is usually shown as 5 minutes early.   Now that might be true.   The times are, after all ‘automatically’ generated by the train’s progress.   If so, were I a passenger from Sturry I would be truly irritated about a train that regularly left 5 minutes early.   Early running is, after all, a cardinal sin.

Or it might not be true.   In which case what does this say about the ‘automatically generated’ times showing the train’s progress?  South Eastern has already admitted that the indicator on Chilham station platform is a work of fiction that crudely approximates to reality, so maybe the truth about reporting times is similar?   And, if so, where does this leave the last year performance figures that showed that South Eastern beat the threshold for season ticket discounts by 0.04%?⨪