Great Western Coffee Shop

I caught the 20:59 from Birmingham New St to Worcester Foregate St last night (Wed May 30). Normally this one goes through to Hereford, but last night it only went as far as Foregate St. The LM conductor was very diligent about announcing this, about why (emergency engineering works) and the arrangements for beyond-Worcester passengers (cross to the other platform at Foregate St and carry on on the FGW train to Hereford). I assume that they were letting the FGW one run through because it then runs empty from Hereford via Abergavenny back to Bristol, whereas the LM one would want to run back to Worcester at a time when they wanted to close the line.

There had been complications in the morning too. I'd caught the 09:31 out of Foregate St. Normally this runs to New St via Shrub Hill, but there was a signalling failure and we passengers ended up having to swap to the other platform (see note) - which meant that it never went to Shrub Hill.

Can any of the industry insiders fill in the detail of what went wrong? Our old-fashioned semaphore signals may be labour-intensive but they're usually very reliable.

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Footnote (for the benefit of readers who haven't been to Foregate St - see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Foregate_Street_railway_station (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Foregate_Street_railway_station))

Foregate St has two tracks and two platforms and looks like an ordinary two-track station. But they're actually two separate single lines and trains travel in both directions over both lines. Platform 1 on the south side serves the line from Shrub Hill while platform 2 serves the direct line from Droitwich. Both lines continue westwards as single tracks over the river bridge and eventually get sorted out into conventional double track at Henwick (where there's a signal box and a level crossing).

All this was done back in the 1970s so as to save a signal box at the junction between the Shrub Hill and Droitwich lines at Rainbow Hill, to the east of the station.

Meanwhile, the station is up on a viaduct, so there's 40-odd steps up to each of the platforms. Which means that swapping between platforms is not the easiest thing to do. We do have lifts to platform level, but that's not very useful when you have to transfer a whole trainload of passengers. If you're travelling west, then you're better off changing at Great Malvern (if you can), because it'll be the same platform.

There's been a track circuit failure between Worcester Foregate Street and Malvern Link on and off for the last couple of days which has required the introduction of pilotman working which has limited the number of trains that can be run on the section.

Are there any plans to sort out the mess of trackwork at Worcester? It must be fairly high up in priorities.

Thanks for that. You might know that the problem would be associated with this new-fangled electricity.

I would have thought it wasn't that high up. The timetable has some horrendous waits at Shrub Hill so as to ensure reliability.

The most annoying weakness was cured 3-4 years ago. Up till then you couldn't reverse a train from the London direction in Foregate Street. The signalling for the single track meant that the train had to go right through the section to Henwick and then come back again. The facility to reverse in the station doesn't get used a lot, but it must make life much simpler at times.

And it has always been possible to reverse trains from the Droitwich direction in the other platform.

Really? I would say the complete inflexibility and lack of capacity is the main problem. Not to mention the fact that if a train is stuck in a platform, it blocks the one whole route. The single track between the two stations and on the approach is also a bottleneck.