Great Western Coffee Shop

Woke up to a single round trip on the TransWilts cancelled - one of the quieter trips in the middle of the day, so sad but not distraught.  Reinstated at around 08:30 ... but then almost straight away, 2 more ound trips cancelled - the 16:33 and 18:32 from Westbury, and the 17:36 and 19:36 from Swindon. Leaving nothing from Swindon between 15:22 and 21:06, and nothing at all after 15:06 from Westbury.

With a timetable included for every household in Melksham in the local free paper last week, not an ideal day to cancel the trains.   They were re-instated at 14:30, but I had to wonder how much damage had been done - whether people would have made other plans / called off day trips, etc.  So ... trip taken to Chippenham on the 16:49 from Melksham; 8 off, 6 on and left with 27  35/14.  17:53 back left Chippenham with 85 passengers; 36 off at Melksham and 4 on 89/40.   Nothing like as many "regulars" as normal, but not carryng fresh air, I was relieved to see.  Oh - and Swindon Town are (a long way) away, so no returning fans to bolster the numbers tonight.

Conclusion - the notification for around six hours that the train was cancelled did have a noticable effect in putting off regular users. However, this weekend that was made up for by new traffic which wouldn't have been receiving online updates and were basically unaware of what had been going on!   Question comes - "at what point should a possible / probable cancellation be advertised - early notice or not?" I don't know the answer, though after today I guess I have one more piece of evidence to help work out the answer.

Of coures, the real solution would be to have enough crew available to cover all the advertised trains in all but the rarest of circumstances!

To follow up ... the second re-instated round trip reported with 12 into Swindon and 38 out.   Exrapollating that was probably something line 18 into Chippenham and perhaps 55 back out;  add 6 off into Melksham northbound and perhaps 2 getting on southbound, and you have 24 northbound and 57 southbound passengers.   So 205 passengers over the 4 trains / 51 average.

Slightly off at a tangent, and Graham is probably sick of hearing me say this today, but I think the GWR website should actively state when trains are re-instated.  Currently they are simply deleted from the list of cancellations. 

You would think a train being put back on would be good news and they'd be pleased to draw attention to it.

The afternoon round trip did get converted from "cancelled" to "re-instated" on journey check for a short while (minutes rather than hours) today ... but easy to have missed if you weren't actively watching in those few minutes.

Which I obviously did....  ;D