Great Western Coffee Shop

Why do people keep calling it that?  We stopped doing Summer/Winter timetables in 2004 due to an EU directive.

There really should be a 365 day timetable in the UK, I know it wont happen for decades but the lack of consistency is annoying. Identical service patterns would be so useful, albeit with some pre 0800 and post 1900 adjustments at weekends.

But there isn't a 365-day timetable in the rest of Europe either, eg ski-ing services in the winter, holiday services, motorail, etc in the summer.

In France, SNCF still issues what it calls Winter and Summer timetables, running December-start of July and July-December, although the latter contains many trains which only run until the end of August.

Due to EU law though we can only have a single annual principal timetable change now in December.  The May change is a subsidiary change.

Which EU Law would that be, then?

Directive 2001/14/EC.

It's a load of crap, basicly the timetable should be like it used to be, summer being late May bank holiday to the end of September and winter the rest of the time as changes to the services are required in most parts of the country to cater for summer flows, if we had a 365 day timetable then there would be loads of dated trains which do actually confuse lots of people!

I agree with you on this but unfortunately the EU did not.  I can't see it ever going back to the old system now.

No I think you misunderstand me Trains should run as timetabled throughout, if it can be done in Switzerland between 0800 - 1900 then the UK can do it as well. It'd give much more choice at weekends. I don't want dated trains at all in timetables. It might actually get the country moving too.

Another reason to leave the EU. >:(

What right do Brussels have to tell us when to change our timetable? NR/ATOC should decide on a format that is most beneficial to Britain.

NR/ATOC have no say over Northern Ireland.

Does that directive (which, by the way, is not an 'EU Law', unless you've been reading the Daily Mail) actually specify the change shall be in December?

Annex III suggests not:

Sorry, TerminalJunkie (and John R, for going off-topic again), but that original wording in the directive was amended - see http://www.unece.org/trans/main/ter/terdocs/l_28920021026en00300030.pdf  :P



Edit note:  Just for clarity, I've now split these particular posts into this new topic, rather than leave them competing with IndustryInsider's excellent summary of the changes in services in the FGW area over the past 10 years, at http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=4587.0  ;)

So the EU interferes in domestic train timetables, does it? I know a way for Alistair Darling to save ^40million per day.....

Get some serious track upgrades for a fraction of that.

Rightly so, So that international timetabling providers and bookers (such as DBAHN's excellent one) can change once a year. Makes things much easier.

You know I was only thinking that this morning but that is taking this way off topic but as you say you would get quite a few new miles of track as well as other things... ;)

Here here! The current set up makes the 'summer' timetable very long which means in a number of cases two timetables have to be produced for some routes because of seasonal services.

I'll repeat my comment that there should be NO difference between core 0800 - 1900 services 365 days a year. Occasional additions should be made to accomodate demand only such as the Newquay Summer services. Yes it'd cost but at least we'd have a rail network worthy of the name.

To clarify a 1035 Truro to Penzance service would run at that time every day of the year including weekends and bank holidays.

Ahh, thanks!


It appears that they were responding to requests from the Rail Industry...

Why? Is there a huge demand for travel from Truro to Penzance at 10.35 on a Sunday morning in January, or indeed most of the year outside the summer? I doubt it. Are you saying we should pay vast amounts in taxes and fares to move empty trains around every Sunday morning?

In my part of the world, there would be no point whatever running something resembling a weekday or Saturday timetable on the Cotswold Line on a Sunday morning, because the numbers travelling are tiny.
After lunchtime they build up, as does the service on offer, reflecting the flow back towards London at the end of the weekend.

The same applies to many other routes and operators, who are responding to what the market wants. When operators talk about a seven-day railway, what they really mean is one that is available to them after about noon on Sunday, to handle the very heavy flow of passengers in the afternoon and evening. And the flow towards London at this time is, of course, the reverse of that which applies at such times from Monday to Friday.

I'm saying that like crampt rolling stock that Britain if it wants to be respectable should offer services of a regular pattern at the same time of the day 365 days a year, if it can be done in other parts of Europe I see no reason why it shouldn't be done here. Indeed it might well start up demand that nobody thought would exist.

You know I was only thinking that this morning but that is taking this way off topic but as you say you would get quite a few new miles of track as well as other things...

To get back on topic, why can't the EU keep its nose [snout] out of GB domestic train timetables? I thought there was something called "subsidiarity"? Another barmy EU Directive goldplated as usual.

It's all part of providing a level playing field across Europe for rail operations as part of moves to end the monopolies of state-owned rail operators. All it did was put a fixed date on the change, so everyone knew where they stood and formalised a system that had operated for many years through the UIC anyway - BR didn't just change train timetables in isolation, they did actually have to make sure that, for example, there would be an SNCF boat train waiting for ferries the other side of the Channel.

And if you really think that somehow, were we to leave the EU, that we would be able to go our own way and just carry on trading with EU members as if nothing had happened, I should point out that in order to trade under favourable terms through the European Economic Area Agreement, Norway has to implement EU directives, despite having no say whatever in framing them. But they can probably live with this, because there are only four million of them and they are sitting on far more oil and gas reserves than are left in the British bit of the North Sea - we don't have that luxury.

Oh, and the Treasury would immediately trouser the money, not spend any of it.

But there aren't any boat trains anymore that I'm aware of

Eurostar?

Thalys and ICE to London 2011, The British Network is part of Europe.

Quite - my point was that this has gone on for years, never mind the EU. For boat trains read Eurostar, and just the same for Chunnel freight trains, which connect in France, Germany and Italy with services throughout Europe - and maybe with the Germans now owning EWS, and Eurotunnel doing a deal with SNCF, we will actually start to see the freight volumes grow to the levels predicted when the tunnel was being planned.

Eurostar is surely the exception for which we don't need to make the vast majority of our timetables conform to Europe; same must go for freight.

The CTRL is un-connected to the BR network. No need for synced timetables.

Are you suggesting that HS1 is a closed system?

I think not...

If Btline is suggesting this, then I wonder what South Eastern are going to do with all those new Class 395 Units... ??? ;D :P

It could also be said that it has simplified things as we now have a single major timetable change each year rather than two.  I remember in the 1990s people complaining about timetables changing.

I remember in 2006 LOTS of people complaining about timetables changing  :-\ ...

No, I mean about how the Eurostars do not switch to domestic tracks anymore.

However, you make a good point about the Javelins, which I forget!
::)

To come into/out of Ashford International the Eurostars have to cross over domestic paths

But if some of it has to tie in with Europe, as it does, then it all has to, because the timetable in Great Britain all has to tie in together.

EMT wants to make good connections with Eurostar at St Pancras, so that influences its timetables, which in turn affects LM, XC, TPX and Northern services along the way up to Yorkshire.

In order for freight wagons and sections of container trains to make their journeys on from the tunnel or from Wembley yard, they have to connect into a series of EWS services heading in all directions, which have to mesh with passenger services, etc, etc.

And I really don't see what the problem with this is anyway. Is it just because it's something to do with 'Europe'?

We are something to do with Europe, just in case you hadn't noticed - we're all descended from successive waves of migrants and invaders and our language is a mix of elements from other European languages. And our economy depends on trade with the EU.

How? EMT have trains arriving into St Pancras throughout each hour on a clockface timetable. The Eurostar timetable is by no means clockface!

And I would argue that domestic time-tabling would always come higher than EMT trying to get good connections.