Great Western Coffee Shop

I sat on the platform at Salisbury yesterday ... and watched the hourly pattern.

I arrived at around 15:42 - a signal stop out beyond Laverstock and a slow run in on the Exeter train.  The east facing bay platform had two trains in it - a 2 car on the blocks and a 3 car nuzzled up.

At about 15:55, the 3 car left (for London) followed a few minutes later by the 2 car (for Southampton and Romsey) and it seemed just a few minutes later another 2 car came in to take its place ... then another three car nuzzled up alongside.

Come 16:20 or so, the Exeter to London service paused in the station briefly, followed shortly by the Cariff to Portsmouth train.  And finally, my train to Westbury pulled in, departing at 16:40.  As we pulled out, I could see round the bend the next hour's Exeter train pulling in to start the cycle again.

2 x 2 car diesel units say in the line behind the wesbound bay throughout the hour, ans as we left I saw around a dozen more carriages in the depot.

D'you know - a couple of little throughts struck me.

Why not bring in the Exeter service ahead of the Cardiff, and let the Cardiff overtake it?  Platforms 2 and 3, and you have a connection

Why not bring in the London service ahead of the Portsmouth, and let the Portsmouth overtake it?  Platforms 2 and 3, and you have a connection

Why not let the the 2 car carry on to Westbury. The whole route from Portsmouth to Cardiff - EXCEPT the Salisbury - Westbury section - has two train an hour, and this would fill the gap.  And you would have an integrated service, hourly service at Westbury Leigh Halt (to and from Salisbury where the locals of there and the neighbouring community of Dilton Marsh.

Hey - by using one of those spare 2 car units and carrying on from Westbury to Swindon, you could even carry alternate trains on from Westbury to Swindon - and have an appropriate service on the TransWilts.

Won't happen, of course - that would require co-operation between Stagecoach and First, and I expect the Monopolies Commission might have a "North Devon" word or two to say about that.   Or is there some way ...

I'm dangerous when I get 59 minutes to think

Excellent idea but as you said it will require some co-operation between First and Stagecoach. SWT might have to stretch its fleet a little bit more to try free up some of those class 158/159's to allow some of the Romsey/Southampton - Salisbury local services to be extended to Westbury/Swindon.

Of course hopefully soon SWT will find a emu to put on the Lymington branch on weekdays which gives us another 158 to play with.

Wasn't there a suggestion about getting swt's London Waterloo - Bristol services to run to Swindon instead?

No comment.  :-X

Some really interesting thoughts there.

I guess one of the main issues would be that you would create a large number of connections that rely on trains from Exeter (single line), Cardiff, Portsmouth and London all presenting themselves punctually (unless you build in large amounts of slack, which would not be popular with through traffic).  So as soon as one train is late either it has a knock on impact on the other TOC's services, or, more likely, the connection would be missed and pax would need to wait up to an hour for the next service.

And if you are reliant on that connection to get to a time critical appointment, it would be a brave person who chanced it.

It does seem as though there a lot of dmu's that spend an inordinate amount of the day at Swindon and Salisbury when they could be used far more productively (bearing in mind the leasing charge of a unit is a large part of the marginal running cost of a service).

It is, indeed, frustrating to see lots of trains with longer turn arounds than really needed (70 minutes at Swindon, around 45 to 50 minutes at Salisbury), but they're hard to swap over during that time ... trying to schedule it results in some rather nasty scheduled head on collisions near Holt.

Your question of missing connections is interesting .. whether it's an irritant or worse - and I don't know the answer to that.  (Poll started!).   But I do think that with our compensation culture, it's probably cheaper for the TOCs to miss connections at times.

This already happens of course with the SWT (South West Trains) Waterloo - Bristol service giving extra journeys including at the extremities of the day as the stock moves to/from Salisbury depot.

You may recall that this was originally operated as a Regional Railways Cardiff-Bristol-Waterloo twice daily service when Eurostar commenced in 1994, but after privatisation and the creation of the SRA it was found that the service was taking up valuable paths on the SWT route from Salisbury into London and with comparatively low numbers using it with and no pick up towards London or set down from London between Warminster and Waterloo the economics were adverse.  I believe a negotiation with SWT to initiate the current arrangement followed.  This shows that arrangements can be made for alterations to franchise boundaries and 'incursions' into one operators area by another and presumably the addition of an extra return Bristol - Waterloo train shows it was a commercially sound decision. I use it often to visit family in south London.

I can't give details of what happened, because I was not privy to them and I was only told the 'bare bones'.  It also indicates how the SRA were sometimes quite 'hands on'.

The Regional Railways service from Waterloo was carried on by Wales & West and Arriva Trains Wales too.

The SRA wanted to improve performance out of London terminals, and as a result when the original franchises were expiring from privatisation, the SRA began a process of streamlining TOCs in the South East. This saw the merger of Anglia/Great Eastern and West Anglia services from Liverpool Street in to one TOC - ONE. The Great Northern part of WAGN was merged with Thameslink (Kings Cross/St Pancras) to become FCC. As a result, a casualty out of Waterloo was the loss of ATW Cardiff services.

Now turning to sets with what may appear long layover times in places like Salisbury. It should be remembered that often turnaround times in London can be short due to pressure on platforms. If a train only has ten minutes turn around at each end it could take hours to recover time after service disruption - or trains have to turn back short or miss stops etc...

You have to also consider the ripple effect, making a change in isolation at one station may make a lot of sense however when this is mapped out across all the routes and destinations a slight change has a large impact elsewhere

Yes - in complete agreement.   It's not simple, and the long wait I experienced would have been much less had I arrived from Waterloo into Salisbury on the stopper.    It is indeed much more difficult than I suggested, with the single line service to Exeter (and into London at the other end), and the Portsmouth - Cardiff is notorious for crossing so many other lines and being awkward to schedule.


Yes, agreed.  It's more the 2 car Romsey train which sits there for 41 minutes that I wonder at ... the 41 minutes doesn't quite give it time to get to Westbury and back, but 2 hours and 41 minutes gives alternate trains time to get to Swindon and back with just one extra set. Can't do that hourly, though, unless you added a passing loop halfway between Trowbridge and Chippenham, and you then hit reliability issues.

In with that mix, you can take a look at the mish-mash of other passenger trains on the Westbury - Salisbury section with destinations from Westbury of Warminster, Salisbury, Southampton, Brighton and Waterloo  - some hours there are two trains at present between the Portsmouths, and other hours there's nothing - to move towards a 30 minute service.  And you end up potentially releasing resources in the Westbury area - perhaps for Frome / Yeovil improvements; you may also have another one or two Waterloo - Bristol trains completing the pattern.    But the matrix as you clear the mish-mash is horribly complex ...

Making Salisbury a nodal interchange between the Exeter London and SW Southampton South Coast is an interesting idea.

However how do DaFt specify it? Curently it's covered by two or more franchises which are being let at different times.

An even more interesting thought why not split and divide trains between the routes (providing 159 158 compatibilty can be sorted out). So you could have a Portsmouth to Exeter/Swindon service and vice versa. But then again DaFT don't like splitting 

The Salisbury - Romsey loop service is an interesting one, as it uses 3 units - would only be two if it terminated at Romsey.  So, what is the benefit of extending it to Salisbury? Clearly with only around 25,000 entries and exits each per year Dean and Dunbridge would not justify the extension, but that seems to be the only flow it serves, as it doesn't provide an alternative between Salisbury and Southampton. However, by operating a unit hourly from Salisbury to Romsey, I'm guessing that SWT pick up a share of every fare from north of Salisbury to south of Romsey. So maybe it's an ORCATS raid, disguised as providing a service to Dean and Dunbridge.

Indeed, if it were restricted to a Romsey - Eastleigh shuttle (could even run twice an hour at a pinch), two units would become available. This would require the main line local stations in the Soton area to be served by the electrics, but historically they always were (headcode 93, usually with a 4 VEP - sorry, showing my age, now).



 

I expect extending the service through to Salisbury is convenient from a crewing perspective, as the crews working the services are based at Salisbury I believe.

The Salisbury/Chandlers Ford/Southampton Ctl/Salisbury services are crewed by both Salisbury and Fratton staff.But that service being of a circular nature only has one possible place to start and terminate, so whilst 41 minutes may seem a lot, I'd rather err on the side of caution than have too little recovery time.

Interesting idea. Maybe the loss of a through service to Southampton would be worthwhile for residents of Chandlers Ford if it meant a half hourly service. But is there any freight that uses the line at the moment? Do paths even exist for a half hourly service even if the stock was available for? Such a shuttle would also mean that Salisbury and Romsey lose a train direct to Southampton Central each hour.

Good point re freight. After all, the Chandlers Ford line survived for many years purely for freight so that could be an issue.

It isn't a proper circular service, it's often referred to as the figure of six service. Trains run Salisbury-Romsey-Southampton-Eastleigh-Romsey and return, so they do have two terminating points.

Fair point.

I don't quite understand your point about the service not providing an alternative between Southampton and Salisbury. The running times are not too different due to the extra stops, and certainly northbound the services leave Southampton almost half an hour apart.  NRES certainly shows it as a 2 tph service.

I also don't believe you can realistically view it as an 'ORCATS raid'.  That would apply when a TOC made its own unilateral decision to add an extra service, or extra calls in an existing service.  Whereas in this case an 'informed' decision was made by DfT (in SWT's 2006 SLC2 valid from Dec 2007) to extend the SWT service and transfer the intermediate calls to SWT, IIRC in order to speed up the FGW longer distance service.  The proposal first surfaced in the Mar 2006 SWML RUS, apparently in response to stakeholder requests.

Then the additional calls at the two minor stations to make them hourly (during most of Mon - Sat) were later additions in an attempt to grow passenger numbers, originally SWT made no more calls at Dean and Dunbridge than FGW had done.

Paul

 

When you have two main routes crossing, unless one of them has an increased dwell timetabled for overtaking I think you could normally only have one optimised connecting route.  However in this case, going back a fair while, I think the 'reasonable connection' that they have tried to sustain IS that for the Portsmouth/Southampton to Exeter via Yeovil (and vice versa).  To the best of my recollection that has usually been the case since the late seventies.

Therefore by default, Waterloo towards Westbury changing at Salisbury (and vice versa) is not the intended priority.

Paul

My proposal in the past was to run the Romsey service on as far as a reopened single platform at Wilton. I guess Warminster would be just too far to go and have a reliable hourly timetable

Paul

The problem with the Portsmouth/Southampton to Yeovil/Exeter connection is that the timings are a bit tight (about seven minutes), and passengers have to change platforms.   If the train from Portsmouth arrives on time, the connection works well, but it doesn't take much delay to cause problems.   And I assume that holding the Exeter train for more than a few minutes is difficult, because of the knock-on effects on the single-track beyond Wilton.

If the timetables could be tweaked to give an extra five minutes between trains, the connection would be more reliable - and it might be possible to make it a same-platform interchange.   And passengers making the "other" westbound connection (Waterloo to Westbury) wouldn't have quite so long to wait at Salisbury.   But that's easy for me to say - I'm sure that actually doing it would be far from straightforward.

The eastbound connection is much more comfortable - fifteen minutes, and a same-platform or cross-platform interchange.

Steve

Fair comments. I misread the timetable and thought the services from Salisbury ran via Eastleigh. Which they don't, so making my post a load of tosh.

Nevertheless, thanks very much for posting your informed view, steves - and may I offer you a warm welcome to the Coffee Shop forum!  :)

Thanks anyway, John R - it all adds to the interesting discussion here, and encourages constructive debate.  ;)

Don't be so hard on yourself. If one of the UK's major train operators can describe a lot of their on board announcements as 'tosh' then you can be forgiven for thinking the same of one of your posts.  ;)

I've learnt something as a consequence of this thread. There's a way to legitimately manipulate through fares  because of the figure '6' (nearly) loop SWT service between Salisbury and Romsey via Southampton.