Great Western Coffee Shop

Somehow despite living in Oxford for eight years I had managed to avoid ever using a Chiltern service until this week - I was staying with friends in the city of dreaming spires and heading into Birmingham for lunch with the sister, who works close to Snow Hill station. So rather than using XC to New Street, just for a bit of variety I changed at Banbury onto Chiltern for the remainder of the journey.

Impressions were generally good. I like the class 168 stock, nice and comfortable, fixed tables well-designed with a pull-out leaf (although I suppost it could get tricky if you were using a largeish laptop as the leaf is at a different height from the rest of the table). Plenty of legroom too. Minor gripe was that both units I travelled on had transmission that was very noisy at certain times during the journey, and the noise lasted for some time. On-board staff were pleasant, very efficient with ticket checks and made informative announcements without descending into verbal diarrhoea.

The less good aspects were firstly that my train ran through to Snow Hill despite being advertised everywhere I could find as terminating at Moor Street (although that actually worked in my favour, just seems like sloppy attention to detail on someone's part) and more seriously the information provision at Banbury. The CIS was out of action so I essentially found my trains by educated guesswork. Staff were thin on the ground and although manual announcements were made they were only "the train now approaching" sort, far too late for anyone who hadn't guessed their platform correctly to get to the right place. I saw a few passengers miss their trains as a result.

Incidentally, I "copped" an LM 172 unit on the hop between Snow Hill and Moor Street on the way back (yes, I know it would probably have been quicker to walk rather than wait for the train but I don't know the way!) and these appeared very impressive.

Edited to add...
Incidentally, it was nice to see a scrolling message appearing on the information screens at Snow Hill essentially saying "we welcome interest in our new trains, feel free to take photos but please don't use a flash"

Major problem with the Class 168's and their derivitives in my opinion.  I think it's the pull out tables that vibrate?

The 168s are getting quite bad with vibrations IMO. The sooner they're slapped on the Oxford's to give us West Mids people the loco hauled trains the better!

I find it weird that Chiltern have axed Snow Hill stops from some trains - they coped with 2tph to Snow Hill before Evergreen 3.

Congratulations Btline for resisting the urge to put the word 'axed' in CAPS.  :P

Mainline couldn't now cope withte delays into/out of Snow Hill - there's very little catch up tie built into the TT

Felt like the entire passenger saloon in all honesty, with the vibrations coming directly through the floor - really not pleasant at all!