Great Western Coffee Shop

My journeys at the weekend are often disrupted due to engineering works and it's often in the same area as the previous week. Looking at the SWT website, as most of my train journeys are provided by them, all I see on the Engineering Works page is just where and when works are taking place. It would be nice to know what exactly is being done i.e track replacement, signal upgrade,.....

Is there a web site that would tell me what is happening?

This information is published within the industry through a document (more like a paperback book called the WON (weekly operating notices)).

I am not sure how keen NR would be on making it public because the information might be useful to cable thieves etc. During engineering work downtime is very rarely wasted, often multiple types of work will be happening within various possession along the same piece of line, so whilst a big task like rail replacement might be taking place, elsewhere there might be bridge inspections, S&T work and so on too.

The 2 years of Engineering Access Statement (EAS) - formerly the rules of the route - is publicly available online, currently up to December 2014, within a few weeks they'll put up 2015's info:

http://www.networkrail.co.uk/aspx/3741.aspx

Although it takes some wading through to find the actual engineering works calendar which are in section 7, with separate sections for each NR route, and then it gets superseded by other documents as the planning becomes more refined, for someone wanting to know broadly what's being done month by month it's a reasonable start.

With the benefit of hindsight it's been reasonably accurate for Reading re-development...

Paul

It would be nice to shut a route down for several weeks and do all the work in one go, this only happens in exceptional cases so engineers will get at best 52 hours over a weekend or at worst 8 hours in which time the possession has to be taken and given back in time; equipment has to be set up and then removed at the end, temporary disconnection of cables, track etc and the reinstatement, the task that is planned is done its likely to only be part of a larger job. 

A job to an outside who would say that should only take a week or two to do doesn't realise that with less than 52 hours at a time this can take weeks if not months to do.