Great Western Coffee Shop

This morning due to the problems near Didcot, there were no trains at all from 8.45ish to 9.45ish departing from Maidenhead..  The information boards were giving out wrong information. Top marks to one of the station employees though who kept us informed by regular visits to the platform (the tannoy wasn't working either). The train journey wasn't too pleasant at all and took an hour as the train (as you might imagine) was full to overflowing! And then we got dumped at the far end of platform 13, behind another train and just as we arrived, then they must have announced our trains next destination, as just as we were trying to get through the narrow bit between platforms 13 and 12 (and there were lots of us!), just as many people were trying to squeeze through in the opposite direction!! I finally arrived one hour and 16 minutes late.. That is quite impressive!

Anyway, while I had a nice hours sit in the sun at Maidenhead, with my coffee and paper I thought up a couple of questions that hopefully someone will know the answer to..

Where were all the trains? Surely if the problem is at Didcot, then there must have been lots of trains somewhere between Reading and London (the local turbo trains that is). Yet there wasn't even an emergency half hourly service in operation.

Why couldn't they use one of the Maidenhead/Marlow trains and send that on into Paddington instead? That would have affected a lot less people than having no service into Paddington for over an hour?

Several intercities passed through while we were sitting there? Couldn't one  or more have been stopped to let us get to work?

Lets hope they find all those trains before the evening rush!

Chances are if the amount of trains is reduced, the Intercity trains will be wedged aswell.

Thanks for that.. I did wonder if that might be the case...

Its not in FGW finical best interest to stop an pick up with unscheduled stops as the train is then delayed by the TOC and they have to pay NR for that as it was an NR problem NR will pay compensation to FGW but you and I as passengers won't see a bean of it

..and does anyone know where all the trains were hiding yesterday?

I had a look at the Live Network Updates on the FGW website yesterday at about 09:00 and there was at least one entry saying "This train has been revised, it will no longer call at Twyford, Maidenhead, etc." So never mind adding extra stops to trains, it looks like FGW were actually removing scheduled ones!  :-[

Just two of the many tricks the TOCs get up to ensure they keep up their performance figures.

One other which I believe SWT was  very fond of was terminating trains short of their final destination to get them back ontime for their next journey. Provided it's completed a certain percentage of its journey the train is niether cancelled nor late.

Another, often referred to in the "Coffee Shop" is excessive timetable padding so that a train can be 30 late during large parts  of its journey but arrive on time at its final destination.

The really sad thing is that there is army of accountants who do nothing but argue who is to blame for any late running or cancellations and, therefore, who is finacially penalised. However, they don't help improve the perfomance one little bit.

Not true anymore, it has to complete the full route and booked stops in order to meet PPM.

Nice!