There's a principle in place, concerning trains in the West. In times of crisis, protect the core flows and tuck cancellations and part-run trains away on routes that will hurt the fewest numbers of passengers.

That's not very good even in the short term, but when crisis becomes seemingly permanent, shouldn't it trigger an immediate review and corrective action? Otherwise, what we see now rolls on till the end of time or until the government, who given the amount of control they have over the railways, are at least to some extent responsible for this, ceases to bankroll the dysfunctional system they've had a hand in creating.

Given the shortage of trains, and also that, as we hear, staff time is perhaps not rostered efficiently, and rosters are not drawn up in a way that lends resilience to the system, this means that (infrastructure issues aside) while the likes of Bristol to London are often  somewhat cosseted, other links no less important to the people they serve - and that possibly have infrequent services in the first place - are completely hammered with cancellations, to the great detriment of the railways and the people who use them.

Mark

 

Perhaps not today, but on pretty much every other Sunday, a lot of people in Cornwall wishing to travel long distance towards London would be keen to discuss your theory about core flows being protected.

 
From reading elsewhere, it’s quite clear that what we are seeing today won’t be the last time mass cancellations on a particular line will occur.

I’ll say it again, I really do feel GWR need to fess up and admit that they are incapable of running the planned timetable at weekends and introduce a timetable that they can provide giving more certainty to their long suffering passengers.

Where’s the government and local MPs in all this? We hear enough about the woeful services provided by Avanti, Cross Country, Northern and TPE but never about GWR.

 

Yes.  They promised to do that when they culled two round Saturday trips from the Westbury to Swindon route a couple of years back - "We would rather have seven reliable round trips that eight or nine in the timetable, subject to random but not infrequent cancellation on the day".    The promise has not been kept - the timetable is thinner than it used to be and the cancellation rates if anything have got worse.   Head we lost and tails we did not win.  Foolish to believe the promise.

 

'Core' being Cardiff / Bristol >> Paddington, so, yes, people travelling from Cornwall have every reason to discuss many aspects of this, including why the interior fit out of their long distance trains is suspiciously slanted towards the needs of the railway to shift large amount of people between Reading and London Paddington.

Mark

Mark

 

Careful now, or you will start to sound like me ! suggesting that the new trains are commuter  style or at best outer suburban and not inter-city.

 
There are certain services which are almost never cancelled....

Shift changes at Swindon.

 
There are perverse choices that seem to be made routinely: 1L10 0720 SWA-PAD seems never to be cancelled, but 1L11 0743 SWA-PAD seems to get cancelled if the wind's blowing in the wrong direction. As there's a massive gap after 1L11 (and it's an 0835 arrival at CDF), that would be the better one to keep at all costs, even if it meant cancelling 1L10 from time to time.

 

It may depend on the rest of the diagram for the 2 sets.