Greater Anglia warn there's little they can do to keep going during extreme weather
Their service is back to normal after days of disruption caused by Storm Eunice and Franklin
Greater Anglia is warning there's very little they can do to keep going during extreme weather.
After Storm Eunice brought our regional rail operator, to a standstill and Franklin saw it reduce it's service, yesterday.
Jonathan Denby is the providers Head of Corporate Affairs.
"If you have something as serious as Eunice, which was a storm of the scale of which we've not seen in thirty years, with trees down on all lines, it is quite difficult to cope with all that. As that impact is not constrained just to the railway itself, it affects the whole region and you could end up with trees on the road. If there's a Code Red in place talking about a risk to life, there's a limit to what you can actually put in place".
He told us that nowhere in the East was spared:
"We saw trees down across the entire network, pretty much every route had at least one tree down in one location or another. The West Anglia route had suffered such significant damage in a number of different places that this took the whole weekend to completely repair all that. Gradually over the course of Sunday more and more routes came back into operation. But then of course having got Storm Eunice out of the way, we then had Storm Franklin.
He recalls how they handled the record-breaking gusts and went on to say that a review's now in place:
"The issues that we saw with extra trees coming down clearly caused further disruption and so then of course the focus was then getting those resolved. As the wind subsided on the Monday afternoon, the focus was then getting things in place to start getting a more regular service back as soon as possible and with a view of having a normal service from Tuesday onwards.
We're now trying to make things more resilient in terms of the plan we put in place, because then when something like this happens again, you can look at things that went really well and things that we could improve on, from last time.
There'll be a joint-review with Network Rail to look at things we could do regarding the way we plan for, resource and communicate the changes that happen".