Great Western Coffee Shop

Although officially described on NR as vandalism/signal failure, the story at BHM and amongst some train staff was theft of signalling cables.
One of my sons was caught up in the disruption, being on his way back to Exeter from Lancaster Uni for a birthday weekend. He was booked on the 1912 ex-BHM which did not leave until 2036 and arrival at St Davids was 2315, some 90 minutes down. Other evening services were delayed by up to 2 hours or thereabouts. The services to/from Manchester seemed to be running pretty much to timetable but at BHM there were PA announcements instructing holders of Advance tickets not to board a service for which they did not have a reservation! I am told that as an attempt to prevent too much overcrowding it failed spectacularly, so one wonders how the TM's were told to deal with passengers who were on the 'wrong' train.   

As there would have been many passengers with advance tickets using XC services, I would suspect most people ignored that request and piled onto the first available service. As XC trains would have been rammed the chances are no one would have had their ticket checked anyway. Besides, I cant see a TM wanting to pick a fight with already fustrated passengers having been delayed because of a rail related issue because they were on the 'wrong train'.

From my own experience at times of major delays whether caused by the weather or rail issues and trains end up packed to the rafters, TMs tend to keep to one part of the train so they can open/close the doors and allow the train to be dispatched at each station stop.

When services are majorly delayed TOCs cannot expect people to wait for 'their booked train' to arrive as it may not turn up at all. Natural instict is to get on the next available train when there are major delays.

FGW are very good at lifting restrictions when there are major delays to help people get to their destination which I suppose is a bit easier to do with an 8 carriage HST as apposed to a four/five car voyager!