Sunday service cuts

[whole diary]

[grahame]

17:05 Westbury to Swindon due 17:48
    This train has been revised.This is due to over-running engineering works.
    Road replacement transport will operate from Melksham to Chippenham.
    Last Updated: 28/02/2010 13:09

18:19 Swindon to Westbury due 19:06
    This train has been revised.This is due to over-running engineering works.
    Road replacement transport will operate from Melksham to Chippenham.
    Last Updated: 28/02/2010 13:09

It's a good job we haven't arrange an outing today then 



Let's see what happens to the third (and final) train of the day ...

[Sion Bretton]

Cancelled

[Chris from Nailsea]

That's another rather rubbish service for 'Melksham' today, then - train-wise as well as station sign-wise.   

[grahame]

That's another rather rubbish service for 'Melksham' today, then - train-wise as well as station sign-wise.   

I've just been looking back through the stats ... that's the fifth day this year that all the schedules services have been cancelled quite late on.  In 59 days - that's a 7.25% rate.

[devon_metro]

To clarrify, this was an infrastructure issue as such, beyond FGWs^▸ (First Great Western) control.

[grahame]

To clarrify, this was an infrastructure issue as such, beyond FGWs^▸ (First Great Western) control.

Yes, agreed.  The first two I notes as "overrunning engineering works" at the top of the thread; the third I didn't see on the reports but I would have guessed at the reason being the same.

But having the entire service withdrawn at shortish notice for five days in 59 isn't a good record for the rail industry as a whole, and customers don't really care who's fault it is. They'll accept the odd extraordinary weather or suicide, but even those reasons if repeated will lead on the the justifiable question "shouldn't you be doing something to keep your trains running?".  As I recall, cancellation targets say that 99% of trains should run and I think that includes all/most cancellation reasons in the 1% failure allowed