Great Western Coffee Shop

Network Rail (and their contractors) excelled themselves this morning by an engineering possession which over ran by about 3 hours.

At one point during the disruption the 07:10 Bristol Temple Meads - London Paddington via Bristol Parkway which WAS running this morning was revised to operate via Bath Spa and Chippenham this morning due to the BTM to PAD services being diverted, but not calling at BPW. Then at the normal time for this service to depart all was ready except the signal stayed at red. This passed about 15 minutes of time and as the time for the next BTM - PAD service was approaching, the 07:10 was cancelled,

In total I saw there were about 25 services which were either cancelled, re-routed, started at a point into the journey by-passing Bath, terminating short of destinations not serving Bath or had additional stops inserted into their schedules this morning to cover for the missing services.

Included in the cancellations was this mornings up Melksham service to Swindon.

That what comes of Network Rail scheduling 8 hours work to be done in a 4 hour possession.

Pathetic! I bet there were many angry passengers at Bath Spa this morning as well as other stations that would have been affected. Did FGW lay on replacement buses?

None of the service incidents I logged had any info re replacement road transport.

Very short notice.

I'd like Network Rail to apologise so that FGW don't get lumped with the majority of the blame.

They could of delt with the chaos better though!

Thats easy to say Jim but i've been working in that sort of chaos and theres not really much the TOC can do, you can never get replacement busses in the morning because they're all on shool runs etc.

Very true

But is there anything stopping FGW passengers from using First buses between Bath and Bristol or points in between in cases of disruption, after all at the end of the day FGW profits together with those of First Buses profits all end up in the pockets of the First Group shareholders.