Delay ... or cancellations in our case :-(

[whole diary]

[grahame]

Delays to services between Westbury and Trowbridge Due to safety checks being made between Westbury and Trowbridge trains have to run at reduced speed on the Bristol Temple Meads bound line.
Impact:
Train services running through these stations may be delayed by up to 20 mins. An estimate for the resumption of normal services will be provided as soon as the problem has been fully assessed.

The 07:34  Westbury to Swindon and the 08:49 Swindon to Westbury were cancelled, even though the journey check just says "delayed up to 20 minutes". Everything else (as far as I can see) that runs between Westbury and Trowbridge ran, although there were some delays and one train was stopped / restarted with a new set at Bristol, which would have been frustrating to through passengers.

We seem to have had an awful lot of infrastructure based issues in the last few weeks, and we've got to be very careful not to alienate FGW^▸ (First Great Western) with a series of gripes, report and complaints ... when they are probably just as frustrated as we are at the lack of provision of reliable facilities to run their trains.    It does seem unfortunate that the cancellation chosen this morning is again on a service where there's a 136 minute wait for the next one, rather than on the 30 minute service via Bath, and that it's a service that runs to the d.m.u. outpost of Swindon where there's no depot / other train from which a 153 could be detached to form the return service.

I'm hoping we've just had a string of bad luck, but I don't want to depend on just hope ... so hopefully  there's a look being taken at this and seeing how things can be all worked together to ensure we have a reputation for a reliable service, an done which provides excellent information and alternatives on those rare occasions it has problems.

[TeaStew]

Oh dear Did you abandon or decide to wait? The 0704 ran with a minute or two delay but the trouble wasn't highlighted to me until my Chippenham -> Bristol train called additionally at Oldfield Park to pick up people stranded there.

We just connected with the 0625 CrossCountry Plymouth - Glasgow Central that left Temple Meads at 0830, although I can find no evidence for it online now it was announced that it would stop additionally at Filton Abbey Wood - seems that FGW^▸ (First Great Western) were doing a lot to try to mitigate the disruption.

[grahame]

... seems that FGW^▸ (First Great Western) were doing a lot to try to mitigate the disruption ...

Totally agreed that they do ... they want to provide a service that runs every day, on published schedule every day which is exactly what most passengers want.  On the recent run of things, First have been let down by infrastructure and late-notice (i.e. after timetables are prepare) engineering issues; the trains have been remarkably reliable, but the blame for a non-running train tends to be laid at the feet of the company that was supposed to be running the train.

Decisions on how to mitigate, taken as a situation develops, are always going to be prone to review and perhaps a comment of "it could have been done with less hassle" later.  But the three stage plan needed to run a reliable, used service is (a) to have a chat with the chaps who provide the infrastructure and get them to do better, (b) review problems and mitigation actions to make those actions ever better tuned and (c) have information systems in place that keep the passengers informed.  Knowing a bus is turning up is acceptable;  not knowing what's happening and being told to wait 2 hours isn't, even if a bus is on its way. [Not this morning's experience - I don't know how info systems worked today]