Great Western Coffee Shop

There were all of 73 passengers on board the Cathedrals Express this morning (train manager's count) as it approached Oxford but rather more about this afternoon when the track circuits failed between Wolvercot and Ascott-under-Wychwood.

I was looking forward to getting home nice and early, having got out in time to join the 16.47 (15.51 from Paddington), but after crawling up to Wolvercot we trundled up to a red light at the start of the single line and sat there for 45 minutes before returning to Oxford to join all those who had turned up to catch the 17.31. By just after 6pm, with no sign of any progress getting coaches or taxis - not exactly a surprise given what day it was -  I opted to go over the road from the station for a meal and try the 19.21 (18,22 from Paddington) which did make it through to Moreton-in-Marsh, where we also dropped a driver and guard to take over an Oxford-bound Turbo from a crew who were out of hours. Can only surmise that the big black cloud I could see hovering north-west of Oxford had either delivered a lightning strike or a torrential downpour to cause the failure.

We do seem to have lost the art of running the railway safely when a failure such as this occurs.

It would not have been diffcult to work some kind of telephone block or the for Ascott signalman to issue a single line order to an Oxford bound train which could have been passed to the driver of the Worcester bound train at Wolvercote.

Unless of course the Ascott signalman couldn't change his points. Presumably there would be no-one there to wind them over and clip them.

In the old days station staff could wind points and act as human tokens (pilotmen) for single line working.

It's one of the ironies of running a super efficient railway with minimal staff that when things go wrong they go wrong rather spectacularly. Witness ECML managing to stop the recording of Any Questions the other week. 

While I was inconvenienced, I'm not sure I'd be quite so ready to pillory them. Track circuits fail for other reasons, not least broken rails. Better safe than sorry.

And they do clip points and use pilotmen, etc, I've even been on a Turbo that went through part of this section at walking pace because the driver on a previous train thought he felt something that might have been a rail break. But it looked as though yesterday's fault had only just occurred as we neared Wolvercot, since I can't imagine we would have left Oxford if the problem had been apparent at that stage.