Lack of service this morning ....

[whole diary]

[grahame]

04:50 Gloucester to Southampton Central due 08:09

This train has been revised.It will no longer call at: Swindon, Chippenham, Melksham and Trowbridge.This is due to a member of train crew being unavailable.

FGW^▸ (First Great Western) Doublespeak "Revision" for "Cancellation" as far as the TransWilts is concerned 

That's the 06:40 (ex Melksham) not running .. next southbound train, 19:11

[inspector_blakey]

Given that the service apparently ran either side of the "Transwilts", does that mean that control did not have a guard or driver available who signed the route?

[grahame]

Given that the service apparently ran either side of the "Transwilts", does that mean that control did not have a guard or driver available who signed the route?

Probably, though the lack of a call at Trowbridge argues against that theory. On the other hand, the fact it did start from Gloucester indicates that it had a conductor ... (this week it's diverted around the Kemble blockage)



With all the rest going on today, this one is probably FGW^▸ (First Great Western)'s least concern today, and in the circumstances that's understood; I probably wouldn't have posted if I had known the chaos to come an hour or two later, and I'm not going to push for any answers.  Of course if it kept happening ....

[grahame]

20091030   19:32   Westbury   22:23   Cheltenham Spa   complete cancellation, rolling stock issues, knock-on effect, bus/taxi running

Full report: "This train has been cancelled.This is due to an earlier broken down train. Road Transport will be in operation between Westbury and Chippenham.Last Updated: 30/10/2009 19:39 "

Again major out of area issues ... but that raises the cancellation rate to 10% cancelled for the week. Perhaps we need to start extending the axes on the graph again 

[grahame]

20091101   17:18   Westbury   18:01   Swindon   complete cancellation, rolling stock issues, knock-on effect
Full report: "This train has been cancelled.This is due to an earlier train fault. Last Updated: 01/11/2009 17:13 "

20091101   18:31   Swindon   19:13   Westbury   complete cancellation, rolling stock issues, knock-on effect
Full report: "This train has been cancelled.This is due to an earlier train fault. Last Updated: 01/11/2009 17:13 "

So that's 2 out of 3 TransWilts trains yesterday, or 4 out of just 27 scheduled services in the last 7 days. 66% or 14.8%. 

It's a very much more serious matter cancelling a train on a line that's already infrequently served than it is on a line with a regular service.   Passengers may not like having to wait half an hour for the next train to come along, but they'll put up with it sometimes.  But the next train after the 18:31 was at 06:15 this morning.  (And before you say "get the bus from Chippenham", it doesn't run on Sundays!)

[eightf48544]

Tis a problem with the way the cancelled trains statistics are applied. As the performance is measured  by secotros and includes hundreds of trains cancelling one or two doesn't make the staitics look bad.

If it was by unique line/station i.e that is a set of stations with the same service, thus Melksham would be a one station reporting point.  Then FGW^▸ (First Great Western) would have much more incentive to run trains on lines/stations with infrequent servies because cancellation of one or two trains from the sevice will drastically reduce the performance. If you have a high threshold then even cancelling one trian would reduce you to below the freshold and permanent discounts would apply.

Maybe harsh on FGW but if you set out to provide a particular  service then you should be measured on how good that particular service actually is.