Great Western Coffee Shop

05:09 Plymouth to London Paddington due 09:44

This train will be started from Bristol Temple Meads.
This train will no longer call at Plymouth, Newton Abbot, Teignmouth, Exeter St Davids, Tiverton Parkway, Taunton, Bridgwater, Highbridge & Burnham, Weston-super-Mare, Worle, Yatton and Nailsea & Backwell.

This is due to a train late from the depot.

Eh? Which depot? Excuse my ignorance but wouldn't that one come from Laira?  ???

Maybe it only just turned up from Laira?  ???

I think there were problems at Laira overnight. The 0702 Plymouth - Penzance was also late this morning (30 mins) due to being "late off depot"

Not the best passenger experience for those of us who use the 0509 south of Bristol.  Fortunately a late running preceding service was running more or less in the same path as the 0509, and with online information, many of us arrived the couple of minutes early to ensure we caught it and connect with the service at Bristol.

Not so clever was it's arrival into Temple Meads at 0758, which meant that the 50 or so of us who hared across the station arrived onto platform 13 just as they locked the doors on the 0800, which was the remaining journey of the 0509.

The platform staff took a haranguing, as you might expect. Their response was, well if someone on the local train had asked the guard, he could have got the HST held. However, isn't it reasonable that in this sort of situation Control can engage half a brain cell and think that there may be a lot of people displaced by the 0509's short running that would have been on the local service. Why should passengers have to do something?

The other thing the platform staff said was that once the doors are locked, they are not allowed to reopen them. Is this really true? In all circumstances? Given the train didn't move for another 30 or so seconds, that just made the whole situation more unreasonable to the 50 or so disbelieving folk at the top of the stairs.

All in all a very unsatisfactory experience.

Problems shunting is what internal information was saying, apparently.  ;)

Pfft. That is utter tripe. I think they were trying to pass the buck. The general rule of thumb is "don't ask as no often offends"

If it's last connection of the day or would result in extremely lengthy delay for passengers then there story might be different. But even then it's hit and miss as filling out a taxi form is apparently less of a hassle.

No, it can and has been done.   Delayed train, such that the connection onto a line that has infrequent service will miss by a couple of minutes.  Quick word with the conductor ... helps if you have 30 or 40 people all wanting the connection  ;) ... it's all about the sense of a few minutes delay to a train that will make it up because of recovery time, versus having the hassle of dumping a colleague with the job of getting 10 taxis as a junction station in the evening.

"More than my job's worth mate"  ::)

Technically yes ask the guard to ring control etc etc, but i'm sorry, a decent duty manager or ops manager at Bristol would know this swap is going on and could consider the knock-on effect.

I don't knock Swindon as much given the number of staff (small) and the amount of crisis's that are always going on.

Swindon control do an amazing job trying to keep the trains running during times of disruption. Disruption that is very often no fault of FGW's.

This was highlighted in episode 2 of the current series of 'The Railway: First Great Western"  on Channel 5.