Great Western Coffee Shop

Yesterday I was very surprised to board a GWR IET train at Aschurch (Tewkesbury)  for a stopping service to Bristol.

Stops at Cam&Dursley and then Yate required passwengers to move down to ther first three carriages.

Is GWR short of spare local train sets, or does it have spare IET's that it needs to use occasionally?

GWR seems to have 3-5 DMUs semi-permanently out of use (due to lack of spare parts).   Being 33-36 years old they should really be withdrawing handful and parting them out to provide spares to keep the others running.   But although that is to some extent happening in practice with parts being 'borrowed' no one seems to have the guts to do it formally as it will leave shortage of trains on paper (not enough to cover all scheduled workings and allow normal number of maintenance spares).

GWR uses about 4-5 IETs on former Castle HST Cardiff-Plymouth services (now split at Exeter) and couple on Bristol-Worcester services (this was presumably what @simonw experienced) This is simply due to lack of anything else, doesn't mean they are best choice.  Also has direct result that a number of mainline IET services are often short formed as 5car instead of the booked 9 or 10car

The arrival of the 26 class 175 units (10 2car, 16 3car totalling 78 vehicles) to Devon and Cornwall will free up some 158, 165 units to Bristol area (timescale is vague, but in drips and drabs over next 10-20 months). The first ones with GWR need to cover the expanded Cornwall metro, then next ones replace the remaining aging Castle HSTs, so probably be 2026 before Bristol area sees an improvement.

I think the idea is that the IETs go back to mainline duties, and Bristol area locals make do with the old DMUs until 2029-2031 when (currently unauthorised and just an aspiration) replacements under project Churchward might arrive.

GWR has never had any regional trains in its fleet, it only has suburban/local trains and intercity style IETs (nothing between).  Technically could argue the 158s are regional, and 166s outer suburban, but as they seem to be used interchangeably they are effectively all same type.  There aren't enough 158s or 166s to be dedicated to regional services.

The result is get GWR suburban fleet doing 3+ hour journeys with no real passenger comfort and ambience, and IETs doing services under 2 hours with catering closed (and excess of First class).   Hopefully their new fleet will be 2 types, regional (which they desperately need) and local trains (South West trains did this with 444, 450, many common parts, but different bodyshells and configuration).  But GWR might try and do a single compromise standard type that fits neither role perfectly, have to wait and see. 

In an ideal world GWR would get battery BEMUs (dual voltage) for its long regional services, with seating designed for 3+ hour journeys, and able to cope with churn (lots getting on and off) at places like Bath.  With other features like 915mm level boarding and working air conditioning whose temperature is identical in all coaches. 5 or 6cars for the regional trains (no shorter) and 3car for local/suburban version (no 2car units).  And platforms extended to 6car length.  I can dream.
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A lot of good intentions are projected from GWR / GBR / DfT / NR but to me so much of the net results will depend on how it's implemented.

26 trains arriving totalling 68 carriages.

We know that some will replace the Castle sets - 3 of those left, perhaps, 12 carriages.  And I hear talk of withdrawal of some class 150 units - GWR operate 20 of these, 2 carriages each, so totalling 40 carriages.  If "Some" turned to "all", that would be 52 out of the 68 carriages spoken for.   That leaves - what - 15 carriages extra, or 3 x 5 car IET to be returned to working on lines to(wards) London.   Not quite that simple, perhaps - I'm nt convinced that 5 car IETs are needed on the local services at Ashchurch, so there could be a couple of other carriage released there, and I'm not sure whether a couple of branches such as Looe could actually be operated by any thing except 150s, so perhaps they are not all going?

This is not a new issue.  My son lived in Bristol and commuted to work in Yate by bike.  When he had evening meetings he would catch the train home; except for the days when the normal train was replaced by an HST and, since he had not reserved a bike space, he was prevented from boarding.  Why couldn't GWR recognise that bike reservations were not normally required and allow him plus bike on the replacement? 

I think this is the key. A 5-car IET has 290 standard class seats whereas a 3-car 175 has 189. For many of the services 175s will be used on, 189 is more than enough, and an IET is overkill. So I suspect we'll see a train-for-train swap in many cases rather than a carriage-for-carriage swap.

All of that means there should be enough to send the HSTs to the scrapyard (or Mexico); cascade the 158s out of Devon & Cornwall for more capacity around Bristol and on Cardiff–Portsmouth; introduce a bit more slack into the Sprinter and Turbo fleets to cover for parts issues; and return IETs to the duties they were built for. I'd like to hope there'll be four IETs left after all that to run an hourly Oxford–Bristol, but time will tell.

Hmm - On a regional journey of just over the hour, 1x5car IET or 2x3car 175s?