Great Western Coffee Shop

Just a follow up to blogs/posts elsewhere.

http://oldfieldparktrains.blogspot.com/

I was also on the 1722 and it was diabolical. Although arriving in BTM about on time a single 158 was never going to cope on a Friday afternoon. FGW should have been aware of what weekends are like, why on earth did Wessex hire the 31's to do the Brighton run for.  ??? ???

Train should have left at 1722, it was announced that it wasn't going to be the first Bath train and anyone who could get through the doors should dash to platform 13. HST duly departed before the 1722. It was full and crushed all the way to Trowbridge, where a female with young child with seat reservations were nearly denied access to the train. Her husband was busily writing complaint letters before the train finally pulled out, 20 min late.

It is, of course, very expensive to have trains on the fleet that are only used for a small part of the day, and one of the big ways to reduce this expense is to reduce the peak.   It happened in the 1960s and 1970s with the reduction of seaside trains on summer saturdays, and First now appear to be doing it (and continuing to do it further in december if you look at the current edition of Rail) with the peak hour services into Bristol.

There is, though, a difference between what an annual tripper will put up with, and what a daily commuter will take.  I'm not a psychologist, but I note that the daily commuter is a stoic type who will, however, be a lot more of a "problem" once he gets rattled that an annual riviera tripper would.

There's evidence that the current tough commute conditions were intentionally engineered - or at least that warnings given by people who already know the service and flows very well weren't taken into account anything like as much as one would wish.   Remember the official view from certain senior civil servants who used to work for First  that a 30 minute stand is perfectly acceptable.

Now - to be fair to First - they seem to be looking (again?) at best use of trains in the critical peak times, inclding some "out of the box" options which weren't previously possible - using trains that were used on one of the three elements that came together to make up the new FGW to support service that came from another element.

Did you hear what happened this Friday night on the 17:22?

It ran 4 car (unlike the 1622) but got split (a all seats taken 4 car 158) , taking the rear 158 off of it, the best bit was


wait for it

a)The crew weren't told
b)it was wedged


BUT


here it comes

The Split unit went to Pompey as a 4 car on what was the 1922 ex Bristol!

I understood the additional diesel hauled service was rented 'by the hour' and was affordable for the times it ran as a suppliment on the Friday. There is still some info on the old Fragonset website, albeit the company has finally gone into administration.

http://www.fragonset.co.uk/archive.htm

Correct, it was indeed "Power By The Hour" which is what made it fairly good value