Great Western Coffee Shop

This morning that 09.04 Maidenhead to Paddington was 16 minutes late arriving at Paddington.. We crawled from West Drayton all the way to just past old oak common and then speeded up again.. No announcements were made to help us know what was going on. I suspected congestion, but then why did we speed up again!

Does anyone know the reason for this morning's delay?

And then, tonight the 17.44 Paddington to Maidenhead arrived in Maidenhead 14 minutes late.. Again, no announcements! I suspect we were following a stopper, but does anyone know the reason for this delay? Also the train was supposed to go on to Bourne End at 18.15ish but was delayed at Maidenhead and became the 18.47 to Bourne End instead. That must have been nice for the people who had to sit on it for 20 minutes or so... Assuming they didn't work out it would have been faster in a taxi that is...

So FGW had 30 minutes of my time today! It had all been going so well up until today! :-\ And the lack of announcements didn't help...

Manic signalling problems in the Southall area caused most of the problems by the looks of it - and then just general congestion in the Paddington area.

At about 07:40 as we crawled along the up main past Ealing Broadway I noticed that a 2-car Turbo (presumably the Greenford shuttle?) was coming to a stand at a red signal on the up relief while ahead of that some orange-suited track staff were examining the points which allow access into Acton Yard. I don't know if that was the main cause of problems or just something else on a bad morning?
 

In the morning there was points issue affecting Greenford services which in turn may have caused residual on to the mainline - but cannot guarantee that is the full reason for it.

In the afternoon the 16:00 from Bristol to Paddington got brought to a stand outside Southall due to a passenger on platform reporting seeing smoke from the train, Down Main and Down Relief were closed whilst the driver checked the train.

Probably a a loo flushing.

There was also severe disruption on services from the Westcountry due to some idiot taking the signal cables!