Great Western Coffee Shop

From the FGW site..

And now a signalling failure affecting all 4 lines at Southall... :-\ :-X :(

Yes.. I've just been told about that.. I am travelling into London in a couple of hours. Fingers crossed it's a bit better by then...

From FGW site just now..

A lightning strike caused by one of those muggy summer afternoon thunderstorms has left its mark.

I may (or may not) be lucky with my train later.. It comes all the way from Taunton so will have not been delayed on it's outward journey earlier as I imagine it left Paddington before the problems started.. And looking at the departures boards it left Taunton on time...

I have my fingers crossed that it doesn't get so delayed on the way that they decide to start taking out stops (specifically Maidenhead).. :)

No such luck with the lightning strike striking cable thieves, I suppose !!!

Looking at some report on an internal system the Western was not the only route where lightning strikes caused train cancellations

Allocated against NR - GWML 157 canceled (strike at Southall)
Allocated against NR - ECML  136 canceled (strike at Alexandria Palace)
Allocated against NR - Southern 39 canceled (strike at Gatwick)
Allocated against the TOC Southern - 155 canceled due to Unit failure due to Lightening strike at Balcombe Tunnel which would put this route at 194 canceled if you add in the 39 for NR

This makes 487 trains canceled due to lightening strikes; in total 17258 minutes have been attributed to lightening strikes yesterday

........ and Bob Crow was not even the cause of the strikes

 ;D ;D ;D

Please would someone tell the people who write the Travel Updates on the FGW website that the Great Western does not have Fast and Slow lines between Paddington and Reading.  It has Mains and Reliefs.  Is nothing sacred?

Which description would the public be more likely to understand?

I think stating both in some way with one of the terms in brackets is best

e.g.

Main (fast) and Relief (slow)

or

Main/Fast and Relief/Slow

That way everyone understands.

Boppy.

We need to be politically correct. So use "relief" for "slow", "standard" for "second", "customer" for "passenger", etc  ;)

Boppy - Everyone understands fast / slow.....

How about Fast(overcrowded) and Slow(even more overcrowded)

Yep.. I think that is just right  ;D

In fact that particular piece of political correctness goes back further than you might realize, all the way back to the days of the Great Western Railway. Always something of a free spirit when it came to trivial matters like standardizing things with every other railway in the country to make life easier, the GWR opted for the main/relief nomenclature when everyone else used fast/slow. Not to mention using 25 inHg as a standard in vacuum brakes rather than the 21 inHg elsewhere, carriage-warming valves that operated horizontally rather than vertically, locomotive headlamps with a side-mounted bracket rather than rear-mounted...the list goes on, and I would swear some of it was done out of sheer perversity!

I can't upload the photo because I'm on my phone but there are full size posters up at Reading apologising for the delays caused by both the lightening strike and a "person in a distressed state in the Twyford area" in the morning peak.