Great Western Coffee Shop

It seems to be well known that occasional and leisure travel are increasingly important to the railways, given the decline of the five-days-a-week commute. And while the traditional commuter is something of a captive market, the one-off experience the occasional/leisure traveller has will have an effect on repeat business.

So today we have...

The Royal Welsh Show specials: cancelled

I have an understanding of how and why this is such an issue at the moment, but the occasional/leisure traveller probably won't factor that in when deciding if they received a good service and whether or not to increase their rail usage.

Meanwhile, I've been keeping an eye on performance of the Pembroke Dock branch. The sort of route where whole families might decide to make a one-off day trip by train, and perhaps do it again if it goes well. Most summers I make one or more trips that way, and haven't even thought to check if it's viable, but this summer I have been keeping an eye on things on RTT and as a result of what I've seen I haven't dared to make the trip. I _think_ I've seen things running well on one Saturday this summer, but the rest have been abysmal. One or both "day trip journey home" trains has been cancelled every time. Often it's both. The GWR journeys have of course also not run on strike days, along with one other cancellation day that I think was an action short of strike day.

So essentially not far off every one-off traveller who decides to catch the train to Tenby will have a bad experience. Hopefully mitigated by replacement road transport, and indeed that's a good effort to resolve things, but that's not many people's idea of a great experience.

I'm not inclined to think someone has decided to cancel so many trains for fun, but customers do like to see things that way. Marketing a "we're going to do better this year" for Summer 2024 is going to be tough.

Certainly the day I went on the through service to Tenby from Swindon there were all sorts of problems.  I ended up with less than an hour there but did get my total fare back.

I’ve said before sometimes I enjoy the journey more than the destination and that weekend they were running via Chepstow so some different views.

The Royal Welsh Special train being cancelled two days out of four this year was nothing short of shocking! Given the event only runs for 4 days out of 365 train crew should have been prioritised to work these services and all others on the HOWL for these 4 days.  Even if it meant cancelling some Carmarthen-Cardiff workings (its not as if unusual for trains to be cancelled on this route!).

Im aware that only Carmarthen train crew can work the South of the HOWL line, so im wondering how its supposed to work when the Royal Special runs. Do Carmarthen train crew travel to Cardiff by taxi or on another service. Its not as if the train crew can change at Swansea like some other workings as the special goes via the district line.  Either way they should have ensured this was prioritised for the 4 days.

With the Tenby/Pembroke line being unreliable too it puts me off a day trip there. They really need to sort it out.  We said last Summer things would be better this Summer but if anything its even worse! 

The 197s coming to West Wales cant come soon enough. Seeing so many overcrowded 150s working from Milford-Manchester is really unacceptable. Its gone on since March. And wasnt great before then. Nearly 6 months of an appalling service!

ive heard the 197s will be running very soon on West Wales services to Manchester/Cardiff.  They have already started running Holyhead to Cardiff.   The 2 afternoon Swansea/Llanelli-Chester (Swanline) have been split at Cardiff in recent weeks so a 197 can operate East of Cardiff.  It was supposed to switch to 197 for the entire service with the May TT change.  Not sure what the issue is but hopefully it can be resolved very soon. Getting fed up waiting now!

 

I get the impression that Carmarthen depot is struggling. Last weekend looks like TfW did a better job, but offset by GWR being affected by the strike! We've also had episodes when the Heart of Wales line has been suspended for 2 or 3 days, although the most recent episode seems to be related to signaller illness rather than driver availability.

Some of the rolling stock problems go back to the (2003?) start of the ATW franchise with its no-growth plan, so as much as people like to say TfW is no improvement over ATW I like to think there's some improvement in the pipeline - perhaps in the next year all the progress with new stock. But the 175 and IET issues of recent years make me apprehensive about so many eggs being in one basket with 197s. Although the already stretched fleet didn't help, the 175 issue could have been much worse had creative solutions not been available. And as the Carmarthen-centred issues show not everything now is down to rolling stock. Covid is a factor, but rightly or wrongly in many armchair observers' minds that's stretching things now. 

I agree about Carmarthen, they often seem to have cancellations due to not enough train crew.

Also ive noticed recently random trains seem to be removed from the timetable, not cancelled just removed as if they were never there.  The 1105 Swansea-Cardiff is an example of this. A few weeks ago i wanted to catch it but ended having to get the 1203 fast train instead.