Great Western Coffee Shop

Co-incidence that all three of these have cropped up at the same time ...


... or is there linkage?  What's the weather like in Cornwall this morning?

Posting this here rather than the London-the West forum as it specifically affects Plymouth-Penzance.

FGW website:
FGW not being too specific about this - anyone know any more information?

lol - managed to post this at the same time as you! FGW not being too specific about this are they?

EDIT: Just had a look on Twitter and according to Sky News it is a derailed train near Penzance.

From FGW: (http://www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk/)

It looks like several of us woke up to spot this ... I have merged the several topics that we started at the same time.

Didnae wake to it.....me body clock is up the swanny :D

apparently an "incident" at Long Rock which is preventing access to and from the depot. Various units & HSTs blocked in

I didn't wake to spot it either - I was hoping we'd be under lots of snow and trains from Acton-Paddington would be cancelled - no such luck though!

A derailment at Long Rock.

Falmouth branch started an hourly service at 0820 from Truro. St. Ives branch was a bus for the start of the day.

Without knowing what happened, I am wondering: if the line were still double right into Pz, would this have caused as much havoc?

Two or four lines into Penzance would not make a difference if the problem is on the depot (I believe it is) thus no trains can exit Long Rock Depot :-\

153 off the road at Long Rock

Mmmm........

This should not happen.  Long Rock has two exits (as all properly designed depots should have) and not all stabled trains should be trapped so I would be interested to see exactly where the derailment occurred.

If it was a 153, it must have happened on the mainline, as I believe DMUs are stabled at Penzance station overnight?
I still can't think of where this could have happened, as there are 2 exits.

DMUs go to Long Rock for fuelling. I suspect it was 5C52 Long Rock - Penzance, which then forms the 0521 to Truro that was the problem, as it is formed 2 x 153 and the first Up Paddington got through o.k.

On the other hand, if there are two exits from the depot, with one unaffected, the problem would not be exiting the depot but the blocking of the single main line into and out of Pz.

The problem being in the way the depot is laid out, where the incident happened it caused problems with exiting the depot via the East and the West ::)
153318 was the culprit and although not de-railed it decided to try and gain access to two different sidings at the same time, one of which was the correct one depending which end of the unit you were on ;D

Imagine that happening at a station......

"The train now arriving at platforms 1 and 2 is coming in sideways"  ;D

2 XC Voyagers and 2 FGW HSTs were trapped, causing a few cancellations this morning.

putting a downer on it,   just remember Potters Bar.....

I passed Long Rock at about 1400 today and 153318 was being winched onto a road low loader. It must have suffered wheel set damage in the 'incident' last week. One unit down.

I returned from Penzance on the 1600 HST and carriage D made a Voyager seem quiet. Wheel flats and vibrations. Glad I was not going to Paddington.

153318 rumoured to be a write off.

Great!!

Just what FGW need, when they are already short on stock!

And the reason for this unit being written off is ???????

Turns out it isn't a write off, at SPM under repair.

that is correct the unit is under repair its not major damage as it is being driven round the depot!! think it is awaiting new airbags and suspension parts but nothing major!!!

Ah shucks ... I couldn't believe that it had truely been damaged beyond repair as part of what sounded like a quite minor incident. I was going to see if it was for sale as an insurance writeoff ... get it fixed and find some appropriate open access service to run it on.  How about .. based at Yeovil Railway Centre, and running to Pen Mill and then up Brunel's original Wilts and Dorset route to the main London - Bristol line.   ;)

quite easy to write off a unit like that if the underframe gets bent!

Especially a product of British Leyland...!

I thought you aspired to a Swindon-Salisbury shuttle!  ;)

We aspire to an appropriate TransWilts service - decent service Salisbury - Warminster - Westbury - Trowbridge - Melksham - Chippenham - Swindon.  If the practical steps to that mean a good, same-platform connection at times (and no time-consuming dogleg), that's not a problem. And if there's a bonus of serving other logical places that happen to be just outside Wiltshire, again that's good news.

There is so much sense in maintaining and servicing a mainline TransWilts unit / fleet at Salisbury - except that a 153 or two would be "oddballs" at the SWT depot there and I'm not sure how that one could work out;  I note that Stagecoach are pulling the plug early on the oddball units to Lymington.  If we were speculating about recovering a 158 from somewhere, that might be sensible.   So my "pie in the sky" proposal was to use folks who are used to looking after 'specials' - isn't there a mainline loco or two already based at Yeovil?

06:50 Yeovil Junction -> 08:33 Swindon
08:45 Swindon -> 10:01 Salisbury
10:11 Salisbury -> 11:33 Swindon
11:45 Swindon -> 13:01 Salisbury
13:11 Salisbury -> 14:33 Swindon
14:45 Swindon -> 16:01 Salisbury
16:11 Salisbury -> 17:33 Swindon
17:45 Swindon -> 19:30 Yeovil Junction

Funnily enough  ;)  the Westbury - Salisbury legs are at the "opposite" half hour to the Portsmouth - Cardiff, helping towards the aspiration of a half hourly service on all sections of that line. Some - such as the 13:11 ex Salisbury - take over from an existing service (ex Soton, I believe) potentially releasing that unit to bolster the TransWilts further towards the appropriate level.  I won't go to far down this analysis, as it's based on a difficult path; in reallity you would need several units on an independent fleet in order to always have one in service - I recall FGW had a number of Adelantes for just a single diagram as they were phasing them out?   It's also not been checked for single line occupancy, nor for a non-blocking approach from vested interests - better for all to 'work with' those who are already around than to do more than casually speculate about what could be done.

153318 now back in sevice after trying to do the splits at Long Rock earlier in the year :o

Been on the Falmouth for the last couple of days 8)

There's what appears to be a similar incident this morning ... and a fresh thread has been started on the subject at

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=7013

Rather than risk confusion between the threads, I'm going to lock this one and invite contributions to the other one ... if anyone has any specific follow up on the earlier incident, though, please let me know so that we can add it here.