Great Western Coffee Shop

Would appear no money for Shrub Hill ....or even the locked in signalmans loo !

I hope that some of this can be soared to provide a  bus link to Gloucester. There has been no direct service apart from the 2 hourly train link for over 40 years !

This sounds like good news but there doesn't seem to be a link and it's posted in the Swindon/Cheltenham board rather than the Cotswolds Line one - help me out here chuffed!!

See http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=12018.0 for details. ;)

Up until about 2/3 years ago LM provided a service, although not strictly clockface, in between the FGW trains.    It was 170 worked witrh the occasional 153 but only lasted a couple of years due, it was alleged, to light passenger loadings.

London Midland retain one service between Birmingham New Street and Gloucester via Worcester Shrub Hill on Fridays only. 2300 BHM-GCR 0020. They'll tell you it is to retain route knowledge. I suspect though it's an ORCATS raid, paying a better return than providing a two hourly service between Worcester and Gloucester.

The problem was the service pattern, it was roughly hourly with the FGW service in one direction but in the other direction the services pretty much followed each other.

I certainly agree one problem was that the timetable was clockface and that trains sometimes terminated at Worcester Shrub Hill rather than continuing to Worcester Foregate Street.

I think London Midland would have got more people on their services if trains had continued beyond Gloucester to either Swindon or Bristol Temple Meads. If they had done the latter then that may have allowed FGW to  free up a unit which could have been used elsewhere or to allow for a clockface hourly service between Bristol & Yeovil.

Gloucester to Swindon is 50 minutes, so that's one unit required for a two-hourly service.   The current local service on the Stroud Valley require 2 units, as the run time is just over an hour from Swindon to Cheltenham, and that results in a low utilisation and a unit parked up in Swindon most of the time.  The current Stroud Valley service can't simply be cut back to Gloucester as there would be a significant negative effect on the people of Cheltenham Spa's ability to reach London every hour, but with the train from Swindon carrying on north, there wouldn't have been that problem.


Which would (a) have freed up the bay at Swindon most of the time and (b) allowed it to collect passenger fares rather that being parked up!

Running a journey at 23:00 won't yield much out of the ORCATS numbers.

I don't think the time of day has any effect on ORCATS calculations.

London Midland get a share of the revenue on all the 'Any Permitted' flows between the stations where their service operates. That share is, I believe, based (amongst other factors) on the capacity of the rolling stock they use, the frequency of the service and the journey time.

It's perfectly possible that that income, when only operating one service, yields a better return than operating a two-hourly service.

A more frequent service requires more track access payments - one of the largest costs a TOC has to pay.

Its a pity there isn't enough time for the units which work the Cheltenham - Swindon shuttles to run to Westbury and back in between their  trips along the Golden Valley.

FGW perhaps if their had the resources available and there was the demand there to justify it  fill in some of the two hour gaps off peak with an additional Cheltenham -London service that might release one of the golden valley units and give them enough time to run a few trips to Westbury and possibly down to Salisbury.

The calculations allow for the proportion of the total traffic that gets to be carried on each specific journey.

That proportion is dependent on the time-gap between the departure and the previous one, and on the demand at that time of day.

There's three time profiles involved - one for anytime tickets, another for seasons (concentrating on the peaks) and another for cheap day tickets (starting after the morning peak).

My point was that there won't be much of a demand profile at 23:00. That's probably true of all three profiles.

Also us Swindonians who want to catch an XC service going north would have an additional change with a further delay. We spend enough time hanging around on Cheltenham station as it is.

Once the redoubling is complete, I wonder whether the additional flexibility will mean that timings can be tweaked to free up the second unit.

I doubt whether the turnaround at Cheltenham helps either with the need to shunt north, into the sidings and back out again. If a south facing bay were built on the start of the old Honeybourne formation* then it would ease the operating constraints for terminating trains and maybe enable more of them. I'd have thought an obvious improvement in due course would be two tph on the Stroud line, 1 IEP to London and a local to Swindon. But I can't see how this could currently be fitted in at Cheltenham with a third service terminating from Cardiff.

* I know there's an industrial unit in the way, but I can't imagine the purchase cost would be extortionate.

London Midland have no Track access rights on the Golden Valley.    To obtain them, it would take a lengthy and bureaucratc process through the ORR and DFT

My suggestion was only considering the current inefficient use of FGW units (though noted another poster had suggested it). I'm sure whoever holds the franchise for the GW would not want to share revenue with another operator.

It's worth noting that ATW got track access rights through to Cheltenham a couple of years back, so there is a precedent, although that was on a much more minor scale.

Perhaps another use for the unit would be to extend the service from Cheltenham to Oxford rather than terminating in the bay at Swindon. Via the West curve at Didcot you could reach Oxford in 30 mins from Swindon.

That's an interesting thought. When Reading is closed over Easter the Cheltenham-Swindon services are extended to Didcot Parkway and the hourly service is maintained with 2 Class 150s and 2 HSTs. That's effectively the same number of trains in use as normal, the HSTs just aren't running through to London.