I've had to cancel several turns/shifts at the heritage railway I volunteer with among other things due to strike days. I find myself expediting driving lessons (for a car  ) and sorting things out on that front, despite not really wanting to.

I don't like the prospect of some of the rumors and conversations going around regarding what the gov's plans are with the railways, so still supportive of the action.

The pessimist in me reckons we'll all have lots of time to reflect and look back on what we had as we queue on overly congested roads...

While things did somewhat improve this morning, I suspect that there were incentives/more focus to ensure a "complete" service ran yesterday for the Coronation day-trippers.

Still plenty of gaps today, but seems less dire on the South Wales route than it was looking yesterday evening.

Hopefully something comes up to tie it in more closely with Scotrail/the Scottish Gov.

It doesn’t surprise me that the costs are a bit all over the place with the current arrangements of crews and locos.

The last time I used the sleeper, seated from Fort William back to Edinburgh, I was hoping to travel to Mallaig and back but due to the outbound train being late it was a rather blunt “We’re a different company so won’t be waiting for Scotrail to get back”. Unsure that would’ve happened for anyone hoping to connect with the sleeper from Mallaig that evening.

It seemed to be a (relatively) minor issue compared to the meltdown(s) last week with a handful of HSS^▸ (High Speed Services) trains having to traverse the Down Relief line between Paddington/Acton West and Southall East Jn.

Seems my comments were taken and slightly adapted. 

The staff at Newport did well at keeping us informed, and were quick to sort out missed connections when people did eventually start arriving on down trains that had diverted via Gloucester. We were able to wait on 1L34 which I assume had been sent back in to platform 1 at Newport quite early on…

Not to be a spoil sport but could they perhaps be referring to lorry trailers? 

I’m in the same boat. I have an IET, HST^▸ (High Speed Train (Inter City class 43 125 units)) + 3 mk3s and some other bits and bobs but no feasible space at the moment.

Reading/browsing the catalogues is helping to pass the time though. 

My RailRiders pack arrived on day two of lockdown. 

Also hair gel and razor isn’t seeing much use at the moment for presentation working at home!

1) Earl’s Court?

It felt almost therapeutic cruising at 50mph from Didcot to Swindon earlier. Maybe not so much if you were in a hurry to get somewhere.

Speaking of all over the place today...

I took the 1330 from Swindon to Gloucester which ended up being 26 mins late (annoyingly close to the next delay repay tier  ). The reason for the delay was waiting for the driver from a late running Bristol to Paddington train which appeared to be scheduled for 1338 but arrived at 1350 in the end. Seems like some shuffling is taking place behind the scenes to keep things moving but surely this would never be possible as a standard diagram?

Software integration being the day job, it’s interesting they appear to not have chosen to use the plethora of existing codes for the new on board systems. 

Sounds like some sort of debug mode perhaps. 

absolutely...if all goes to plan. 

I’ll be around on the Sunday volunteering on the Swindon Panel Society stand(s).

We’ll be taking a mini/portable version of a panel with us to the show. Running the same tech scaled down to what we use on the Swindon Panel at Didcot Railway Centre.