Great Western Coffee Shop

Looking if their might be a football special to bring Yeovil fans back from Weymouth after the 13:00pm kick off(match finish's at approx 14:45pm)

I looked at the 17:30pm departure from weymouth to Bristol,and out of curiosity only it states,

change at Castle Cary AND Westbury due to shortage of car parking places at CC.

Although the 17:30pm from Weymouth is a direct train to Bristol.

Thoughts any one?

2V94 goes via Frome.  National Rail Enquiries is telling you to change to a train that overtakes it between Castle Cary and Westbury, meaning you arrive at Bristol 9 minutes earlier than remaining on 2V94 (it even says the 1820 from Yeovil PM is a GWR service from Weymouth to Bristol Temple Meads).  NRE is showing you the quickest but not necessarily easiest journey.

That is a National Rail Enquiries recommendation not unique to today

I doubt GWR has given any consideration to the football local derby.....

Did anyone tell them about it?

From Journeycheck

Was a three car 158, not great for a bank holiday regardless of a local derby football match taking place.

158956 (that's 3 car) - hardly adequate for a seaside return train in the afternoon of a bank holiday, let alone one that co-incided with a football match!

Had it not been swapped for the 3-car 158 at Bristol on the southbound journey, the 17:30 from Weymouth would have been a 2-car 165 (165134, according to RTT).

That’s not to suggest that 3-cars was ideal, but it was looking likely to be much worse earlier in the day...

For a Bank Holiday Monday, and good weather, it should have been BOTH of those units coupled together - except (of course) that they don't couple up ... and perhaps that it was a swap of duties rather than the 158 coming off depot and the 165 going on?

We still seem to have a rolling stock shortage ... is it because of
1. Budget constraints telling GWR only to run short trains
2. Lack of serviceable carriages due to limited fleet size
3. Lack of serviceable carriages due to lots needing short(wish) term repair?

Many thanks to eightonedee for a message the other day for "On this day" to let me know ...


And I think there may be something of a clue in there.   My understanding is that it wasn't expected to take over four years for the 19 (is it?) "new" 4 car trains to be available ...

165 134 started its day on the first round trip from Westbury to Swindon.   (I was on it for the 06:11 from Swindon as far as Salisbury and apart from staff I was on the only on one board until Westbury).   The train then continued to Southampton Central.  Its return trip to Great Malvern was cut short at Gloucester due to crew shortages.  It then picked up the return from Great Malvern at Gloucester before being swapped for the three car at Bristol Temple Meads as mentioned.

On fleet availability.  In the same way on board crew numbers have been affected by shortages so have maintenance ones.  It has also been compounded with problems getting spare parts for some trains, although I understand that is now improving.

Isn't the root cause of the shortage of diesel rolling stock on GWR caused by the cancellation of the Oxford and TV branches electrification? And the fact that it was cancelled without any real thinking about what the knock-on effects would be and since then GWR have just had to muddle through and they dont really have enough units to run even the current reduced services.

If the electrification was finished then both class 165's and class 800's would be freed up for use elsewhere. And remember a lot of money has already been spent on the half-completed electrification to Oxford, including an electricity ‘feed in-station’ that has been sat idle at Radley for 6 years.

The whole situation is stupid beyond belief; there are 12 year electric trains that are being put into storage and 27 year old electric trains going for scrap but hay rather than electrify more of the railway why don’t we add diesel engines to some 35 year old trains instead.

In my opinion this issue won’t be resolved until the ideologues in the Dft and Treasury, who would rather have money spent by private industry on trains rather than by the government on infrastructure, are removed or ignored.