Great Western Coffee Shop

It's been a while since I have travelled daily from Thatcham into London but for the last two weeks there have been only the odd delay of a few minutes which is fine by me.

So what has changed of any note (if anything)?

Of course I may live to regret my own optimism and positivity!

Nothing to do with operational issues but it's half-term so loads are lighter. Very pleasant...

Yes, that is true! There must have been an issue West of Newbury today because the 602 THA to PAD started in Newbury - I believe it normally starts in Bedwyn.

But that, in addition to it being school hols, meant a comfortable journey in.

Punctuality is generally on an upward trend at the moment (see my post yesterday giving the most recent charter figures).  The terribly unreliable signalling between Reading and Paddington has been much less flaky lately as it beds in, and more obvious things like the Reading rebuild are now starting to show their advantages, with far less instances of queuing for a platform at Reading for example.  Hopefully performance will continue the upward trend - though there's an awful lot of work still going on.

One of the things I have noticed at Reading is that on the paired Main Line platforms (8/9, 10/11) that even if an adjacent paired platform is free, trains stick to their booked platform and are frequently held outside the station waiting for it to be free.  I guess this is because of the way the Automatic Route Setting is configured, i.e. it does not have a 'first come first served' option built into it.  Sometimes causes an unnecessary delay :P

interesting, last week I was on the BPW-Pad line and was surprised to have to wait 5 minutes outside of Reading.

When we eventually reached Reading station it didn't look busy, I was puzzled by the wait after all the money spent on rebuilding the station but you explanation makes sense.

Yes I've noticed this as well, especially heading into P10/11. Surely the system can be overridden in the event of a service being late? Used to happen all the time at the 'old' Reading, at the last second a quick dash across from P5 to P8 was quite common practice

No-one piling through signalling cables perhaps?

Could be - but why? Have they learned how not to? Run out of unpiled-through ones? Finished piling the relevant bits?

That may have been the case for you BB, but I was on the 0905 THA-PAD yesterday and it was rammed - people squeezing to get on an already full and standing train at THE.

Most of the pax making it busier than usual seemed to be families off for days out in London. This is of course the first off-peak train in from our part of the world.

I mentioned to a few that there is an HST that runs the same stopping pattern (starting from NBY) about 25 mins after this service (which in my experience is usually lightly loaded) which they were unaware of (I would have been on it aside from needing the earlier train to get to my meeting in the City on time).

Coming back last night it was bustitution from RDG at 2318 for me, which ran efficiently (and even dropped some of us on the A4 nearer to homes than the Station  :)). Signs of work underway (under very powerful lights) on the line between MDG and THA as we drove past.

I think that they have done a lot of the piling (or at least enough to have "found" most of the cables)





Edit note: Quote marks fixed, for clarity. CfN.

Unit failure at Reading, by the time they had got another it was too late to run down to Bedwyn ecs, so it got as far as Newbury.