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I thought I would try and do a rough draft of a possible future Cotswold Line Timetable.

Here is an outline of Mon-Fri Northbound.

NB: should be ticks where calls are, may come out as "4" instead!

You should notice many possible enhancements:

*the full hourly service, half hourly in the evening peak;

*halts get a through service from London;

*Cathedrals Express is an express and saves 10 mins!

But I do not know enough about timetables to put in all the times. I have also left out the 4 min time improvement mentioned by Network Rail.

I have also not put in any more halt stops - these might go up.

Please suggest improvements - for all I know, this could be impossible - and upload better versions!

It would be great if we could produce an excellent timetable fulfilling all needs! ;D

Diagramming that is likely to be a total nightmare as you seem to have random extensions to Hereford/Gt Malvern

I have kept these the same as currently.

Of course they would have to be changed - any suggestions which ones would need to be?

Fair enough, although there isn't currently an hourly service!

Very true. I suppose, we will have to until the southbound ones are drafted to finalise.

Btw, does Lee, Grahame (or any other admins) have any drafts for the line?

Put it this way:

Service X which extends to Hereford will not form the stock for service Y (1030 to London for eg)
You would therefore need service Z coming from Hereford to fill this gap. etc etc

So work out the times it takes to get to Hereford, give a sufficient break, time to return and see how it works  :P

I openly have my email address on my account profile. Check there (I would rather not put it on a post!).

No, it is Hidden, you need to change it in your profile. It will always be visible by you but you need to change it for anyone else to see it.

In the good old days (late 1970s and early '80s) there was an hourly Paddington to Worcester intercity service with the service going on to Hereford every other hour, except early morning and evening when there two consecutive services from Hereford - oh for the old Cathedrals Express, 1800 hours from Paddington, platform 1 and first stop Oxford; 0700 from Hereford in the morning.

I seem to recall a midmorning departure from Paddington to Paddington (via Worcester, Kidderminster, B'ham New Street and Banbury). Class 50 heaven all the way if you wanted.

What were the calls between Oxford and Worcester - was it just Kingham, Morton and Evesham?

My timetable for May 79 to May 80 shows a broadly 2 hourly service, with two gaps of 2 1/2 hours during the day. There were 7 through services to Worcester and only 3 to Hereford. They would have been Mk 2F stock and Class 50 hauled. The earliest possible arrival in Padd for Ledbury and Hereford pax was 1012.

So I'm not sure which time period you're referring to. I don't recall an hourly intercity service at any point in the past.

What were journey times?

All "intercity" calls until very recently were Charlbury, Kingham, Moreton in Marsh and Evesham. The other halts used to be request stops I think

I've tried to scan the page, but the quality isn't good enough. Typically between 2hrs15 and 2hrs20 in the down direction to WSH and around 5 mins faster in the up direction. 0712 from Hereford arrives 1012, and 1700 down arrives in Hereford at 2009.