What I find bothersome about it is that that line already has a name: it's the East London Line. All seems needlessly confusing to me.

Sounds like a good day for me to have been running early/being lazy – I went for the number 205 bus to Paddington, rather than walking to Euston Square for the Underground.

The bit that's not brilliant here is that they're still insisting on running into Bristol Parkway and reversing, rather than serving the South Gloucestershire area by having it stop at Filton Abbey Wood instead. This has the effect of the up London getting stuck behind the Cardiff to Portsmouth service. So a diversion that in itself should add less than 20 minutes just turned into delays upon delays until the trains were running about 90 minutes late yesterday afternoon.

There are perverse choices that seem to be made routinely: 1L10 0720 SWA^» (Swansea - next trains)-PAD^» (Paddington (London) - next trains) seems never to be cancelled, but 1L11 0743 SWA-PAD seems to get cancelled if the wind's blowing in the wrong direction. As there's a massive gap after 1L11 (and it's an 0835 arrival at CDF^» (Cardiff - next trains)), that would be the better one to keep at all costs, even if it meant cancelling 1L10 from time to time.

So why don't these trains have an electromagnetic brake?

They've annoyingly cancelled the wrong trains between Cardiff and Carmarthen. And there's a really unhelpful GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) change on there (moving the Carmarthen service off 1B21, which is good, but onto 1B22 (which might as well terminate at Cardiff) rather than 1B20 (which really needs not to terminate at Cardiff just where it's getting busy – even splitting it at Cardiff into 5 cars to Carmarthen and 5 back to Paddington for an early bath in North Pole Depot would be better)) plus a particular bit of TfW^▸ (Transport for Wales) dog-in-mangerism that will ruin GWR's reliability (the stoppers either side of 1L11 – which could do with retiming a minute earlier to make connections at Cardiff Central into the 0841 Aberdare service for Queen Street and Cathays officially work – have their stopping patterns the opposite way round from what's helpful). Does anyone know where the corresponding GWR consultation is? GWR really should be driving this rather than letting the regional rail operator wag the dog.

I find it slightly surprising that the 38th busiest destination from Neath is Birmingham Moor Street. Yes, it's possible to go there on a Birmingham Stations ticket, but you'd basically have to be mad to try it.

This is a silly service pattern. Cathays is Wales's 6th busiest station and the busiest station on the entire suburban network north of Queen Street. Cathays is overwhelmingly a south-facing station – the suburban network should be called the Vale of Glamorgan Lines. Very few Cathays passengers want Cardiff Bay. In general, they want Central, interchanges at Central, or stations Cogan to Llantwit Major/Barry Island. If we're messing with the Bay shuttle, it should go to Caerphilly/Coryton as the less busy branches.

Cathays is probably an interesting one.

The frequency of these events on the line through Berkshire makes me think this is an infrastructure problem: there ought to be better physical obstacles to prevent these people from a clearly troubled part of the world from accessing the line. Do we need better fences? Maybe electrified? Maybe topped with razor wire?

I hope the digger owner's insurers have paid for replacement DMUs^▸ (Diesel Multiple Unit).

It's really stunning that SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) chose to cut sensible services that performed outside peak hours, rather than, say, reducing Guildford via Cobham to a Parliamentary service, as its ridership fell and still only existed for two hours a day.

Poole is annoying. It's got a railway right up to the ferry terminal and plenty of terminating trains that could be sent along the branch, but no Poole International station.

I tend to offer to swap seats with people who would benefit from them. But if people go about things by banging on about nuisance cheapo Advance Purchase reservations on quiet trains where they are thankfully switched off, I'll point them to the next carriage (there really should be a £10 fee for reserving a seat to deter the bargain basementers).

If the London Underground counts, then there are loads of answers. Paddington to Baker Street, Paddington to Liverpool Street, Paddington to Embankment...