The evening of Maundy Thursday is the single busiest evening peak on the railways all year. While Christmas sees a much larger volume of traffic, it's spread out much more - some people travel nearly a week before Christmas, some as late as Christmas Eve. But at Easter, everyone gets a four-day weekend off work, and everyone wants to take full advantage by heading away on Thursday evening.
However, from the railway's point of view, the Easter weekend affords a rare opportunity to shut lines for four days to do larger pieces of engineering works that simply can't be done overnight or in a normal weekend, be they large-scale remodelling works or simply renewal works in awkward locations.
Yes, it causes disruption to people travelling home or on holiday at Easter. But the railways don't make money from leisure traffic; they make money from commuters paying thousands of pounds for an annual season ticket. Not pissing off the people paying £5000 for a ticket is rather more important than not pissing off those paying £50, so you do the work when most commuters aren't at work.
Unfortunately, this Easter I think the railways - in collusion with Network West Midlands - managed to piss off absolutely everyone trying to travel between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, including me...
The points at Crane Street Junction, where the lines to Walsall and Birmingham split right outside Wolverhampton, were to be renewed, but it couldn't quite be accomplished in four days. So the lines were closed at 3pm on Maundy Thursday, until 5am on Tuesday morning.
Yes, that's right. They closed probably the most congested railway in the West Midlands - probably the busiest line in England outside London - before the evening peak on Maundy Thursday.
So what can you do when you shut Birmingham-Wolverhampton?
For some of the long-distance traffic, there wasn't really a problem. CrossCountry services between Birmingham and Manchester, and Virgin Trains services between Birmingham, Preston, Glasgow and Edinburgh, were diverted via Wednesfield Heath - a line I managed to use on New Year's Day when there were works between Nuneaton and Stafford. Obviously such diverted trains couldn't call at Wolverhampton, but it did mean that those services ran more or less as normal.
However, Wolverhampton was only shut from the south end: the north end was still open. London Midland's services between Liverpool and Birmingham simply terminated short at Wolverhampton, providing a link between Wolverhampton, Stafford and Crewe. All trains to and from Shrewsbury also terminated at Wolverhampton. At Wolverhampton, to give a safe area for the worksite - which was right off the end of the platform - platforms 1, 2 and 5 were shut, with just platforms 3, 4 and 6 open.
None of that, however, provides a service between Birmingham and Wolverhampton.
Those trains I've already mentioned account for eight of the ten trains per hour that usually run between Birmingham and Wolverhampton: the two remaining services are the stopping trains, which provide a half-hourly service to all six intermediate stations. These ran between Birmingham and Sandwell and Dudley, with buses between there and Wolverhampton.
Yes, that's right: instead of ten trains an hour between Birmingham and Wolverhampton, there were two trains an hour to Sandwell, and buses onwards to Wolverhampton. And to add injury to insult, for whatever reason the trains running the shuttle between Birmingham and Wolverhampton were just two carriages long.
It doesn't take a genius to realise that that probably isn't enough.
To be honest, on Easter Sunday it might well have been fine. But this wasn't Sunday, this was the evening of Maundy Thursday. After sampling the diversions and looking at the work at Wolverhampton, I arrived in New Street just before 6pm and headed over the Victoria Street footbridge to platform 4C for the 18:08 shuttle to Sandwell, if only to see just how bad it would be.
I got half-way down the stairs to see the train pulling in, and the platform next to it absolutely heaving with passengers, about nine minutes before departure. It's difficult to describe just how insanely busy it was, but let me try. Firstly, I'm pretty sure that the passengers, standing on the platform, took up more space than the train did.
After a sizable number of people got off the train - which took a good minute or two - we all piled on. I have been on the Northern Line between London Bridge and Bank in the morning rush hour: frankly, I had more room on the Northern Line. And at least with the Northern Line there was another train just three minutes behind; but the stoppers to Sandwell were every half an hour.
I ended up standing in the vestibule of the two-car class 170 - hardly the best choice of train, but I'll come back to that - and even with five minutes to go to departure there was literally no more room on the train. A shout came down from the middle of the carriage to stop letting people on; I was wedged in next to the door controls and, after general nods of agreement from people around me, I shut the doors.
Just as I pushed the button I had to push back another passenger who insisted on trying to get on the train, saying perhaps more forcefully than I needed to, "no, I'm sorry, this carriage is full!" The doors shut, and the man was left clearly slightly angry, but it would simply have been unsafe to let anyone else on the train.
One person did try opening the doors again - but once he saw how busy it was moved down the platform to try another door, and I shut the door again. "Crush-loaded" doesn't quite do it justice. Unlike buses or taxis or planes, there are no maximum occupancy rules for trains: a train can take as many passengers as it can hold.
Eventually, though, there was simply nowhere for the people to go, and we left people behind on the platform. After letting a train to Manchester go a few minutes late, we finally left Birmingham at 18:10.
There was little need to hold on, as we were so wedged in that there was almost nowhere for anyone to go - except that we called at Smethwick Rolfe Street and Smethwick Galton Bridge, at which people wanted off. Somehow, the passengers for Smethwick struggled off the train, and a few even managed to join the train.
Eventually we arrived at Sandwell and Dudley at 18:25 - seven minutes late, simply because the train was so full it couldn't keep up - and proceeded to spend a full two and a half minutes disgorging its passengers. Definitely a new record for busiest train, and by far the least pleasant train journey I have ever undertaken.
From there, passengers for Wolverhampton were directed to the buses outside, of which there were most definitely not enough; I reckon our two-carriage train had well in excess of 200 people, and I only saw two buses to take them on towards Wolverhampton.
I decided not to join the assembled hordes of people on the buses, and instead crossed to the other platform to head back on the shuttle to Birmingham. The train used a crossover at the far end of Sandwell and Dudley to reverse. The train back into Birmingham was busy - there were still people standing, but I got a seat - but nothing like as busy as the way out of Birmingham had been.
When we got back to Birmingham, the platform wasn't as busy as it had been when I left an hour earlier, but the train wasn't departing again for twenty minutes. I'm told that every single shuttle train between 5pm and 8pm left people behind at New Street.
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So, what could have been done better, and what lessons can be learned for next time?
The first thing to do would be to run longer trains. The shuttles were run with diesel class 170 Turbostars, making me suspect that the overhead wires had been turned off in connection with the works. Fair enough, but at least London Midland could have got a three-car unit from somewhere, rather than the two-car units that actually ran. I saw a three-car unit, mostly empty, on the Wolverhampton-Shrewsbury stopper; just swapping those over would have been a major improvement.
Of course, it's also nice to say there should have been more buses, but that's trickier. Hiring in buses is quite a challenge, especially when buses have to be used for school runs and so on - the level of buses will have been planned months in advance, and there's not much that can be done upon suddenly realising that double that level would have still been busy.
So were buses necessary in the first place? Wolverhampton was still open, and accessible to trains from the north, so could trains have been diverted and still run between Birmingham and Wolverhampton? I think the answer is probably yes. Initial plans had Arriva Trains Wales running trains between Birmingham and Shrewsbury via reversal at Bushbury Junction (on a goods line), avoiding Wolverhampton; in the end those plans were abandoned.
Nonetheless, the same reversal could have been used to get trains between Birmingham and Wolverhampton. Even two trains an hour on that route would probably have given more capacity than the buses that were running, and journey times would almost certainly have been quicker. It would have been risky, and it would still have required buses for the local stations, but it would almost certainly have been better.
The other question that has to be asked is why the timing of the work was as it was. Firstly, why such a long closure? Well, renewing the points is a big job that has to be undertaken in one go, and the points are on a viaduct, making access particularly difficult. Rather than bringing everything to the site in advance and simply blocking the lines to install the points, I think that here the lines had to be blocked just to bring the stuff in.
After that, I think the logic was as follows: we need a little more than four days, so it's a choice between shutting the line on Thursday evening or on Tuesday morning. By closing the line on Thursday evening, you only disrupt journeys home from work; if the line had been closed on Tuesday morning, people's journeys to work would have been disrupted. At least by closing it on Thursday evening no-one is late for work.
I can understand that logic, but I'm not sure I agree that shutting the railway on the busiest evening of the year was the most sensible policy. Keeping the line shut for Tuesday morning - perhaps even all of Tuesday - may well have inconvenienced fewer people, given that by then the Easter holidays were underway throughout the country.
The other thing that didn't help was that Network West Midlands decided to shut the Midland Metro - a tram linking Birmingham Snow Hill to Wolverhampton - for two weeks from Easter Saturday. So while it was available to carry passengers on Thursday and Friday, by Saturday you had no alternative to getting a bus.
At the end of the day, this showed the fragmented, privatised railway at its worst. Network Rail were in charge of the work. Four separate train companies were running trains; all of them made different decisions on diversions and bus substitution. Network West Midlands seemed to be talking to no-one but themselves in deciding to close the Midland Metro at the same time.
That kind of overcrowding and lack of service simply wouldn't have happened in British Rail days, not least because they had enough men to throw at the job and get it done in a shorter time: BR functioned as one unit, not a network fragmented into a million tiny pieces.
London Midland spent half the evening apologising on Twitter: who they were apologising for, though, isn't clear, because no-one was in charge. Seemingly no-one had the authority to sit down and say "no, this isn't going to work, we need more trains".
Worse: I'm not sure if anyone has the ability to stop it happening again. Suggestions on a postcard, please.
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