Great Western Coffee Shop

On Wednesday at 11am, BBC Radio 4 are airing a 30 minute documentary, presented by travel writer Ian Marchant, on the 'Parliamentary' services that currently operate on the network.

I wonder whether he visited Pilning?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vhhcf

As an aside, I can highly recommend Ian Marchant's book 'Parallel Lines (or Journeys on the Railways of Dreams)'. A cracking read.

Marchant has grown on me a lot - for some reason that I'm now at a loss to explain, I initially found his writing style in Parallel Lines irritating, but as I got further into the book began to enjoy it very much. He's presented a few other documentaries on Radio 4 about the railways as well. I've always found them to be very engaging listening because, although he's clearly not a dyed-in-the-wool rivet-counting enthusiast he has a real affection for the subject that comes through strongly. I'll be listening on Wednesday. Well, actually, I probably won't because that would involve me getting up at 0600, but it's on my iPlayer list for sure!

Another of Marchant's books that I've enjoyed is The Longest Crawl, a travelogue describing his journey from the most south-westerly pub in Britan to the most north-easterly, via many interesting places along the way - heartily recommended!

I think Marchant's writing style may have been affected by the increasing amounts of Ritazza coffee he was consuming as the book progressed!

The Longest Crawl is indeed another great read. In fact I think I might re-read that one soon!

His colleague Jolyon Jenkins, when researching this subject, popped up in a couple of relevant threads in the uk.railway newsgroup about 6 months ago. He reckoned the major difficulty they were having was getting officials to speak on the record about the daft services they'd come up with.

Will be interesting to see what they've come up with for broadcast...

Paul

By the way, if you do find yourself listening to "Ghost Trains..." then be sure to stay tuned for "The Secret World", which follows immediately afterwards at 1130. Nothing at all to do with trains but absolutely hilarious!

I've listened to the show (if you've not yet caught it, then you only have until Weds 3rd Nov 2010 10:59am to pick it up on BBC iPlayer) and found it most enjoyable.

Shame there was no mention of Pilning.

However it's worth a listen just to understand the madness (at the behest of the DfT) of a bus that runs once a week between Ealing Broadway and Wandsworth Town to maintain the fiction that the former Cross Country route from Manchester to Brighton is still open (between Acton East Junction and West London Junction) to passengers.

aside .... from the live train feed this morning: