Great Western Coffee Shop

Many of you may already know me, and I see Lee has been posting some of my comments from the FOSBR email group :)

My name is Joe and I'm a member of Friends of Suburban Bristol Railways and I also do a lot of transport campaigning in the Greater Bristol area.

Hi, Joe and welcome .... are you expecting the Bristol Suburban lines to be quiet over the Christmas and new year period, or do they get a different type of traffic?

It depends what people are working really. I've been in touch with National Rail and some at FGW to get them to amend their misleading information that they have put out every bank holiday so far this year that FGW will run a Saturday service. On 27th, 28th December & 1st Jan, FGW say they will run a Saturday service, when the Severn Beach - Temple Meads route runs with a modified Mon-Fri timetable.

Chances are FGW don't know!

Pleasure to have you on board. I see that Severn Beach Line passengers have been having quite a time of it over the Christmas period.....

A belated welcome Joe :) As I look at the FGW status page now, I can already see several Avonmouth cancellations today amongst the 35 or so other disruptions...

Been another poor performance by FGW today with plenty of short of destination services (cancellation in my opinion and those who were turning up for that train) and this is with a reduced Saturday timetable!

Going back to the very busy post debating what constitutes a breach of franchise:

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=1277.msg7086#msg7086

Surely all these services that are either stopping short of their destination or starting from a station further down the route is a breach of franchise. If it isn't I don't know what is.

Sorry for the rant everyone but this is happening EVERYDAY at the moment and it just isnt good enough when you can't rely on whether the service you turn up at the station for is going to turn up.

Here is an e-mail exchange that I had with Peter West of the DfT in January 2007 on related matters :

Dear Mr West ,

I am writing to ask you take urgent enforcement action to secure First Great Western's compliance with the Greater Western Franchise service specification. As you can see from the link below , FGW are clearly not complying with section F5.
http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/fulltime.html

The situation is completely unacceptable from a passenger point of view. For example , NO trains at all called at Melksham station on 16/01/2007 OR 17/01/2007. There was no problem with the line , as two expresses were diverted over it.

Please could you reply stating what action you propose to take as soon as possible. I have copied in certain Melksham passengers who are just as anxious as I am see this situation resolved.

Yours Sincerely
Lee Fletcher

The reply :

Apologies that I have not been able to respond to you sooner.  The franchise agreement works a little differently from the way you understand it and there does not appear to have been a breach of it in relation to the Melksham line specifically.  However, this does not mean that either we view what has been happening as acceptable and you may be aware of strong statements to this effect by Ministers in Parliament.  Equally, FGW have assured us that it has been taking a wide range of steps to bring operations back to proper levels of service.
 
I see from your e-mail of 29 January to Alison Forster that you are aware of the steps which FGW has been taking to restore operation of the services it inherited from Wessex Trains to an acceptable level of reliability.  We continue to monitor the situation closely and, as I have said before to you, the sort of information coming up from users is a helpful part of this picture.

Regards
 
Peter West
Franchise Manager

Thanks for the above Lee. I quote the following from the reply you received from Peter West:

Well all I can say is that there has been little Christmas cheer for those who have had to rely on FGW's local 'West' services these past few days (excl planned shut down over Christmas/Boxing Day) with quite a number of services cancelled short of their destination.

I think the best advice I can give anyone who is about to set out to catch a local service at the moment is to check the live updates page to check your service is actually running before setting out. That way you won't be disapointed by turning up at the station and finding your train isn't running:

http://www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk/LiveUpdateList.aspx