Great Western Coffee Shop

Okay it was a long shot but I thought and write to FGW about our delay from London.

It cost ^120.00 for two singles and I thought that has we were delayed by signal failure, which I understand is not FGW fault, there would be a chance of some compansation in vouchers which FGW could claim back from NR.

Alas the letter arrived back saying although the 18.45 from London arrived Cardiff forty severn minutes late
it was less than and hour.

Not even a small gesture.

So my next trip is by Coach

I'm not sure what you were expecting. The rule is an hour's delay for compensation to be due and it wasn't an hour. If they had offered you something then would they offer anyone else who complained when the delay was less than an hour, and where would they draw the line?

Your journey took 2 hrs 50 with the delay, which is still less than the 3hrs 20 mins it takes by coach at that time of day. But granted the coach fares would be cheaper.



 

Exactly right. You pay your money and take your chances. Read the small print. Compensation paid for delays over an hour only, so you are really wasting everyones time claiming for a 47 minute delay. Thems the rules I'm afraid!

Check out the National Express T's & C's

http://www.nationalexpress.com/coach/OurService/conditions.cfm


Compo for delays noticeably absent.

In fact FGW offer you significantly more compensation than is dictated by the conditions of carriage: these only mandate a 20% refund for the affected leg of a journey if it is delayed by 60 minutes or more.

Afraid I find myself agreeing with the comments posted above. A line has to be drawn somewhere and FGW are absolutely clear in their publications that this is 60 minutes delay at your destination and you will receive a full refund. Incidentally, no actual train needs to have run an hour late: if you miss an advertised connection and the next service isn't for an hour, you will be compensated because the benchmark is arriving 60 minutes late at your ultimate destination due to a delay to a FGW train caused by a rail industry fault.

Oh what a muddle were are in!

At the other end of the latenss scale an IC train can be ontime 10 down and a commuter train 5 down.

Perhaps a better way of doing it would be a percentage latenss on the overall journey time.

So at say at 25% a two hour overall journey would be 30 minutes and a 4 hour jouney an hour. With a max of an hour. Might lead to some brisker running! The percentage could gradually be reduced as an incentive to improve performance.

So people travelling on a train from Reading to London would get compensation for being 20 minutes late, while other people on the same train who have travelled from Penzance wouldn't? How is that better?

If you have the new Today's Railways Europe to hand, there is an interesting editorial about how the Swiss are trying to tackle the issue of what is a delay and how to attribute and calculate them.

Fair comment by you all. Just that if I had paid advance rate problary would not have cared, I had a load of advance tickets but was stuck by snow.

Interesting that in 1987 train journeys took about 1 Hour 40 Mins from london to Cardiff ( Fast Trains), it now takes 2 Hours 3 minutes suppose that is progress.

Indeed. Non-stop from Newport to London every two hours from the start of 125s in 1976.

Of course, now we are told that all the additional stops are needed, and the trains are then crammed to get more seats in. At the start HSTs had 4 x 72 seat SC  = 288 seats. Now they have 5 x 80 =400. (Probably not quite correct but a good indication of the increased capacity.) So then they have to make the extra stops, as a train running non stop from Newport would not be full enough. (It's the same story on the Bristol TM service.)

The ideal service would be six shorter trains, with four stoppers and one fast each hour to South Wales and Bristol,  providing the headline journey times that ought to exist. Unfortunately the much fanfared new trains will be longer if anything, so it would appear as though we could be stuck with the current pattern for many years to come. 



 

These "wonderful" trains run by BR were 2+7, all trains these days are 2+8.

Not forgetting the lost direct journey opportunities to Bristol, Swindon, Reading etc.

Today's Railway, that's where I must have got the idea. In fact the Swiss are trying to take into account how lateness is perceived by passengers, depending on the type of service they are travelling.Thus a late running  local train with less than 50 passengers would not be treated the same as a late running packed double decker commuter train with a 1000 passengers on board. 

They will take into account the capacity of the train and number of connections missed.

So late running from Reading in the up morning peak might be considered more serious than from Penzance, (more passengers inconvenienced ) but this would not necessarily be the same on the way home where a late arrival at Penzanace (more connections missed on route) might  be considered more serious than late arrival at Reading from Paddington.

The problem is that the Swiss manage 95% of trains within 5 minutes and nearly 90% within 3 minutes without all the padding FGW needs. However, under the new system performance drops to 86%.

Didn't Virgin try something like this? the infamous "Operation princess" whic was a total f*ck up in the end!

But I think I'd rather have a Swiss 86% than an FGW 86%!

And it does help having near-universal electrification and gold-plated infrastructure, resulting from steady, sustained investment over many years, unlike this country.

Not running the system into the ground during 2 major wars has also helped.

Exactly, My Grandfather believes firmly (expecting a possible argument here but will go on anyway ;) ) that Bristish Rail was not bombed enough during the 1st & 2nd World Wars. Other countries got their network's obliterated completely, hence they have new infrastructure. But also what this country lacks is lack of investment into the Rail Network. Granted we get a bit of funding, but not as much as the Swiss, Germans or Spanish.

wasn't it willc was saying in a thread somewhere that track was being replaced that was installed in 1946 or 1948??

I usually point out to customers that there was the option of having a better infrastructure back in 1945, but that we would all be speaking German.  (Nothing against Germans of course.)

trains should be long.  The whole point of the railway is that one person can drive a train carrying hundreds of passengers.  Short trains dilute the one major benefit that trains have over other modes.

Quite right. After the war, the Europeans re-built their railways and electrified them.

We built motorways.

The 'Europeans' were busy electrifying long before 1939.  Italy, (since 1902) and Switzerland and Austria, (with no native coal or oil), in particular. The French had begun to wire up parts of the main route to the Cote D'Azur by 1935.  The wholesale destruction brought about by WW2 speeded up the process.  (Our sunbed obsessed friends were turning out some pretty classy steam locos, but also experimenting with very fast diesel trains.)

Here in the UK, faith was pinned on steam, an arguably obsolescent form of traction even in 1935.  This was continued after the war and led to millions of ^s in waste when locomotives barely 20 years old were scrapped from the mid 60s onwards.

The Germans had Autobahns before WW2, though these were I believe, inspired by the Southend Arterial Road.

Ah the good old German Autobahn, Drive as fast as you want, But if you get from Toll Booth A to Toll Booth B in under a certain time we will book you for it ::)

some steam loco's were less than 5 years old when withdrawn! (9f's spring to mind!!)

There is some defence for BR building new steam locos after WW2. Many of the older pre grouping locos were totally clapped out having done an extra 5 years of war service.

Oil was relatively expensive compared with coal and steam locos were cheaper to build than diesel and the infrastructure was there to keep them running.

Whether they should have gone on building them as long as they did, or having built them scapped them as fast as they did are matters opinion.

DB did build some new steam after the war particularly the the 23 2-6-2 a sort of black five to replace some of the older state 4-6-0s. but they also electrified many lines going straight from steam without the diesel phase we went through. The displaced locos were used on non electrified lines until they were either electrified or dieselised those lines that weren't to be electrified.

Thus steam on the mainline lingered on into the early 70s of course in the East DR without access to cheap oil used steam until well after unification.