Great Western Coffee Shop

For the last couple of weeks or so, the peak-time evening stopping trains from Paddington to Banbury/Oxford have regularly been short-formed, i.e. the 17.25 ex-Pad cut down down from the already cramped 3 carriages to just 2, and/or the 18.25 ex-Pad down from 5 to 3.

Especially in the current hot weather, this is a bit of a nightmare. The usual excuse is "due to an earlier train fault".

Are we really to believe that these particular units suffer a train fault nearly every day? Or is this just a load of ******?

There should be a plan to cover for a shortage of units meaning that the Control prioritise certain trains for shortening should there be a general shortage. That means that any failure during the day might result in trains being shuffled around off of their daily diagrams to make sure the really busy trains run to the correct formation. I'm not sure how busy the 17:25 and 18:25 are compared with other peak departures, but they must be busy so it does seem a strange choice of trains.

I'm not aware of any general Turbo shortage at the moment. Though hot weather will always reduce their general reliability a little. There are something like 52 daily diagrams from a total unit availability of 56. That includes any that are booked in for heavy maintenance as well as having to cope with breakdowns, so things are fairly stretched, particularly now that they are covering some trains down the Cotswold Line that were formerly HST's.

A couple of the 3 car sets have recently had the centre cars removed due to major mechanical/electrical problems.......you can see then sat on reading depot

I noticed that last night - the 1758 slough to banbury was a two car 165!  As I was in no hurry I waited for the next train which was a 165+166.

the other thing I have noticed is more of the Reading-Paddington stoppers have been 166 in the last couple of weeks

Also a number of HSTs are being short formed with missing standard class carriages due to being converted to buffet (info from station manager visiting Charlbury this morning). Usual buffet still in place so why remove a standard class coach to convert rather than remove the buffet and convert that?

Because you can't convert the buffet. This was investigated by GNER many years ago and is technically infeasible. Something to do with the difficulty of taking the shell and adding the extra windows in a 30 year old carriage without compromising the integrity of the structure.

They also looked at converting sleeper carriages as well but it never got off the ground mainly because of the positioning of windows along the carriage.

the seat to window alignment on hst's these days is that p*ss poor that they may aswell use old sleeper cars

I've never had a problem with the window alignment.

Interestingly, the ex SWT 442s (Mark 3 bodyshell) now in use by Southern have had their buffet and snug sections rewindowed to match the rest of the carriage. I wonder if this really is a 'cannot do' or more of a 'cannot do cheaply'...

Paul

you go first class lol

I can't say I frequently travel in FC?

travel from paignton alot?

I am sure cost entered into it (and why not), but GNER did make a serious and sustained attempt to investigate the possibility.  I take your point about the 442s, but perhaps they could afford to compromise the structure more on the 442s.  With a lower top speed the  crash safety standards may well be different to an HST.

It might be that as the 442's were a later build than the HST the window framework may have been included in the skeleton of the 442's with the stressed skin applied where as the HST's might not have had the window framework cutting into the stressed skin would not be easy to maintain the integrity of the coach

Going back to the original topic.....!

We had 2 carriages yet again on the 17:25 last night & it was so hot that it was completely hellish!

How can it ever be considered acceptable to have just 2 carriages on a peak-time stopping train on such a busy route?