Great Western Coffee Shop

noticed the other night there is work going on by the side of the fright siding as it passes the back of the platform. Seem to be casting a load of concrete anyone know what^s going on?

Views sought over Theale station upgrade

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Commuters^ views are being sought on the upgrades to Theale station.

The station is set to benefit from a ^2.9m upgrade, which includes a new footbridge, booking office and food unit, with work expected to begin next month.

The plans for the station will be displayed in a large vehicle in the station car park and representatives from West Berkshire Council and First Great Western will be at the station from 4pm to 8pm to discuss the proposals.

The consultation will be held from 4pm to 8pm on September 26.

I am quite impressed that you can tell those lights are at Thatcham!

The image they've used is of Thatcham level crossing, but never mind ...  ::)

Theale station upgrades face delay

Long-awaited work to upgrade Theale railway station has been delayed by nearly a year.

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The ^1.25m project to install a footbridge and lifts to both platforms was due to be completed by the autumn, but First Great Western revealed this week that work will not be finished until July.

Solicitor Tony Roe, whose office is based in Brewery Court, said: ^Theale is a very vibrant community with local national and international businesses using the station, so it is a shame that this delay has happened.^

The project also includes a new ticket office and retail unit, more cycle parking, clearly marked walkways, a new pedestrian entrance and crossing point across Brunel Road and clear signs to key destinations like the village centre and Arlington Business Park.

It is being led by First Great Western and Network Rail, but work was halted when contractors discovered a large waste water pipe around the new station building which needed relocating.

West Berkshire councillor Alan Macro, who represents the Theale ward, described the delay as a ^great shame.^ He said: ^There has been a long-running issue over the lifts and whether people could use them when the station is unmanned, as it is only staffed up until lunchtime through the week and on Saturdays. But we have been assured that the rules are being changed. We very much welcome this news because there were concerns people could become stranded on the platform with no-one there to manage the lifts. But I think First Great Western could have done more to inform people of the delay and the reasons for it, as they have not really communicated with the community.^

First Great Western spokesman James Davis stressed work to the ticket office and retail centre is complete and confirmed the lifts will be available outside of station hours. He added: ^Further plans to enable provision of the lift and bridge, originally due at the same time, were ongoing as we make sure the design delivers value for money.^

According to the BBC:

Work is due to commence in October, with the project scheduled for completion by February 2014.

A MULTI-million pound scheme to upgrade Theale railway station has been delayed by at least another two years. 

The busy station, which handles more than 400,000 passengers a year, was to have received a new footbridge and lifts as part of £2.9m work to improve accessibility.

The improvements, paid for by a Department for Transport fund to Network Rail, will also provide a new ticket office, development of a park-and-rail facility and a new pedestrian entrance from Brunel Road. 

Work was meant to be completed in February 2014, but Network Rail and First Great Western, now known as Great Western Railway, were unable to agree on the design.

Now the project has suffered another blow as the Government has said that funding has been deferred for at least two years.

In a letter to the MP for Reading West, Alok Sharma, rail minister Paul Maynard said that a number of projects were to be deferred following a review.

This, he said, would enable high priority schemes to be delivered as planned.  

“Unfortunately, Theale was one of the 26 stations chosen to be deferred because the project was not as advanced as many of the other projects,” Mr Maynard said. 
“I know this will be disappointing, but I am afraid Theale is not in a unique position.” 

Mr Maynard did say he was committed to delivering the scheme as soon as possible after April 2019. The project is likely to consist of a new bridge and three lifts and believed to now cost between £3m and £4m. 

Theale district councillor Alan Macro (Lib Dem) said: “I am very disappointed about the extremely long delay.

“Theale is a busy station and passengers have to climb up over 20 steps and descend over another 20 to get from the booking office or car park to the platforms. This makes it impossible for disabled people to use the station and very difficult for anyone with walking difficulties.

“The new ticket office is likely to be brought into use soon, so passengers using it will have to walk halfway across the car park before negotiating the stairs to the platforms.
“Given the long history of this project, I have little confidence that work will begin in 2019.”

After the new ticket office was completed, Great Western Railway announced that unexpected work to divert a sewer pipe had delayed the construction of the lifts and footbridge.

Contracts then had to be renegotiated after Network Rail became a public sector body and the work was transferred to it.

Network Rail then said that it had inherited a three-year-old design, which needed to be compatible with the electrification upgrade to the line through West Berkshire.

Mr Maynard did say he was committed to delivering the scheme as soon as possible after April 2019. The project is likely to consist of a new bridge and three lifts and believed to now cost between £3m and £4m.

In a letter to the MP for Reading West, Alok Sharma, rail minister Paul Maynard said that a number of projects were to be deferred following a review.

This, he said, would enable high priority schemes to be delivered as planned. 

“Unfortunately, Theale was one of the 26 stations chosen to be deferred because the project was not as advanced as many of the other projects,” Mr Maynard said.

“I know this will be disappointing, but I am afraid Theale is not in a unique position.”

Mr Maynard did say he was committed to delivering the scheme as soon as possible after April 2019. The project is likely to consist of a new bridge and three lifts and believed to now cost between £3m and £4m.

It also says that ORR are reviewing electrification clearances and will issue new guidance shortly.  That could be very significant in keeping costs down, not just in Theale.  Some have suggested that increased clearances were a large part of the cost overrun on electrification.

There was a letter, from Paul Maynard at the DfT to the local MP, Alok Sharma, which the

During the line closures through Thatcham I have been driving to Theale and catching the train there. An added bonus that because the services are starting from there you can normally be guaranteed a seat. But I digress.

There are lots of helpful staff there - don't get me wrong - but there doesn't seem to be anybody with overall responsibility which I don't think helps matters. Some passengers were confused by the service arrangements this morning and when they excoriated staff  they got replies such as "I don't know I'm just here to <insert job function here>"

As a relatively frequent passenger I tend to know where I am going but not sure how clear things are for the more ad-hoc travellers.

It seems to be the case that with these blockades, Network Rail are paying for additional agency staff to be at stations affected by the blockade. Trowbridge and Westbury have at least three additional agency people at each station to supervise one bus every couple of hours! Although wearing GWR uniform, they are agency staff with (understandably) a limited amount of operational knowledge.

Got on the train at reading to go theale ticket man said train to Newbury got on the train and guess what it only stop at Newbury NOT theale !!

Or getting on a GWR train at Ealing Broadway expecting it to stop at Southall, finding out next stop Hayes.

This has happened to quite a few people, despite all the announcements

Yes, it seems a little ridiculous, and that both are trying to directly compete. I noticed that the Crossrail timetable at Maidenhead on the platform doesn't include any GWR trains too. I thought public transport was to be encouraged, not stifled by individual companies.

Or getting on a GWR train at Ealing Broadway expecting it to stop at Southall, finding out next stop Hayes.

This has happened to quite a few people, despite all the announcements

... but I have not heard of stories of overcarrys.  Mind you, I expect people would be rather embarrassed to post.

Oh, Mr Porter, what shall I do?
I want to go to Birmingham...
but they're taking me on to Crewe.
Take me back to London
as quickly as you can.
Oh, Mr Porter, what a silly *@!* I am!

George Le Brunn 1892

Mods – given the way this thread has gone would it be a good idea to change the title to “Overcarriying and incorrect journeys” and move it to The Lighter Side?

Reading some of these tales reminds me of incidents when I was at Temple Meads in 1979 working the shifts round as ASM’s clerk.

There was the time when a tearful young woman came into the office with a ticket from New Street to Bicester – presumably somebody misheard what she asked them on the platform or misheard a manual announcement. We got her home via Banbury.

Then there was the occasion a one Saturday morning when the overnight trains to Devon and Cornwall were still running, when four men of Asian extraction and a poor command of English came bleary-eyed to the counter clutching Stockport to Euston tickets. They had clearly go on the wrong train at Stockport, and needed to get to Heathrow by 0730. The ASM explained to them that it was their fault because they got the wrong train, and we had nothing in those days that would get them anywhere near Heathrow by the time they needed to get there.

He suggested they take a taxi, but as a precaution to make sure they weren’t ripped off, he told me to go to the taxi driver’s rest room (now the small cafe on the right at the top of the approach on the Old Station side). Did you know what walking in there at 0500in the morning and saying “Will somebody give me a price for a Heathrow?” does? It would have probably woken ‘em up if rigour mortis had already set in...

Then there was the very aggressive bloke that stormed in one day. “Your bloody train didn’t stop at Bristol Parkway!” he ranted.” It stopped at bloody Chippenham, it stopped at bloody Bath, then went straight through bloody Bristol Parkway without stopping!”

He didn’t seem to be the sort of bloke you would want to put right in those circumstances... I often wondered if he noticed the scenery and station names were different as he went up the hill...



Edited to add - seven hours after I posted this I realised that I put it the wrong thread! Could someone move it to "All Newbury Trains used to stop at Theale" on the Kennet Valley board please?

One is a 102-storey giant regarded in its heyday as the eighth wonder of the world, the other a prefabricated footbridge at the Princess of Wales’s local railway station.

Yet the Empire State Building in New York took less time to build than Network Rail is taking to complete a small pedestrian walkway on the London to Bristol line.

Passengers have been left fuming at the interminably slow pace of work on the bridge at Theale station near Reading in Berkshire, where the Princess’s parents and siblings are often seen boarding trains to London.

Construction was already 10 years overdue when it began in January 2023 and it is not expected to open until spring 2024. In contrast, the Empire State Building, which was for decades the tallest building in the world, took just one year and 45 days to complete.
Theale’s MP, Sir Alok Sharma, described the footbridge saga as a “case study” in British bureaucracy and inefficiency.

When the new bridge does finally open it will be the first time wheelchair users will be able to catch trains from the station since it opened in 1847.

Funding for the upgrade to Theale station, which is the nearest station to Carole and Michael Middleton’s home in Bucklebury, was first announced in December 2011, with the budget set at £1.25 million.

A new ticket office was built in 2014 but is yet to open because of delays to the footbridge. In the meantime the budget has rocketed to £9.5 million – coincidentally the same cash sum the Empire State Building cost to build.

The 13 years it will have taken for the village station to undergo its refresh – assuming there are no further delays – is the same length of time it took to build Big Ben or, according to the Bible, King Solomon’s Palace.

In the meantime, passengers access the platforms via steps down from a road bridge, which means there is no disabled access.

Sir Alok told The Telegraph: “The redevelopment of Theale station is a classic case study in just how slowly even relatively small infrastructure projects are delivered in our country, with resultant cost increases having to be picked up by the taxpayer.

“We have to get much better at untangling the stifling bureaucracy and red tape in our system which holds back the time-efficient and cost effective delivery of infrastructure.”

David Sidebottom, director at the independent watchdog Transport Focus, said: “Investment in accessibility improvements at Theale station is a welcome move to help passengers with disabilities travel with greater confidence, however the delays have been frustrating and disappointing.

“Passengers will want assurances that there will be no further delays and for the station to have step-free access as soon as possible.”

Caroline Stickland, chief executive of Transport for All, said any improvements to disabled access were welcome but “the pace of change must increase”.

She said the latest research found that almost half of disabled people report issues with lifts and a lack of step-free access at railway stations.

A Network Rail spokesman said: “Plans to build a new footbridge with lifts at Theale station, part of the Department for Transport’s Access for All programme, were approved in January 2013 alongside a range of improvements including a new ticket office and expanded car park. At this time, funding was only provided for the ticket office and to progress design work for the footbridge.

“A new ticket office was built by Great Western Railway. In 2021, £9.5 million funding was awarded for Network Rail to build a footbridge and lifts. The new facilities are set to open to the public in spring 2024. Great Western Railway will then begin work to expand the car park.”

If construction only started in January 2023 then it has not taken longer to build than the empire state building.  I am sure the time spent planning and finding the finance for the Empire State Building was not included in the build time. 

Author is the political editor at the Telegraph so it's a very odd article really, especially given the very tenuous references to the Princess of Wales. Perhaps the paper needed some filler, he owed the local MP a favour or was just a few sheets to the wind?

Nonetheless, the odd thing really is not how long it took Network Rail to build it (especially given how far in advance possessions have to be planned), but rather how long it took the Department for Transport to fund it.

Ticket office built nowhere near UK train station - as £8m over budget bridge unopened

There is fury as a ticket office is built nowhere near a UK train station - as the £8 million over budget bridge is still not open.

A new footbridge at Theale Station in Reading has already taken 10 times longer to build than the Empire State Building and is over 10 years overdue.

The upgrade on the pedestrian walkway on the line from London to Bristol was initially announced back in January 2013 but Network Rail only began work in January 2023.

Residents are furious about the ongoing lack of bridge, especially after Network Rail said in January of this year that it would be opening in the spring.

A local named Steve told the Express: "Guess what? It's still not open. There was a big banner that said 'Opening in Spring'. But it didn't. And it didn't open in the summer. Or the Autumn.

"A minor inconvenience for able bodied commuters. But not to have station access for all in 2024 is pretty scandalous.

"However, they have opened the new ticket office, next to the unopened bridge. But because it's now 200m away from platform access, the guy who works in there only sells 10 tickets a day when he was selling 150. Brilliant.

"He gets very little info on what's happening. No one does."

Funding to design the footbridge was announced in 2013 while funding for the full project was to start in in 2015. This was deferred until 2021, when the programme was resumed and fully funded by the Department for Transport.

The original budget was set at £1.25million. However, this shot up to £9.5million when a new ticket office was built in 2014.

According to Network Rail, the average accessible footbridge costs between £3 million and £5 million, but the rail operator says Theale station is a very busy station.

This means opportunities to do work are limited. The extra width of the three tracks also requires a longer span across the railway, resulting in more difficult construction.

Reading West and Mid Berkshire MP Olivia Bailey said: "I share the frustration felt by users at the ongoing delays to complete the work on the footbridge and lifts at Theale Station.

"What's more, it is really disappointing that communication from [Network] Rail and Great Western [Railway] about the delays has been very poor. I have asked them to provide an update for station users as a matter of urgency."

If the bridge opens next year, it will have taken 12 years for the station to finally get its new footbridge - about the length of time it took to build Big Ben.

Daily Express has contacted Network Rail for comment.

If the bridge opens next year, it will have taken 12 years for the station to finally get its new footbridge - about the length of time it took to build Big Ben.