Problems in Cornwall

[whole diary]

[grahame]

I thought you aspired to a Swindon-Salisbury shuttle! 

We aspire to an appropriate TransWilts service - decent service Salisbury - Warminster - Westbury - Trowbridge - Melksham - Chippenham - Swindon.  If the practical steps to that mean a good, same-platform connection at times (and no time-consuming dogleg), that's not a problem. And if there's a bonus of serving other logical places that happen to be just outside Wiltshire, again that's good news.

There is so much sense in maintaining and servicing a mainline TransWilts unit / fleet at Salisbury - except that a 153 or two would be "oddballs" at the SWT^▸ (South West Trains) depot there and I'm not sure how that one could work out;  I note that Stagecoach are pulling the plug early on the oddball units to Lymington.  If we were speculating about recovering a 158 from somewhere, that might be sensible.   So my "pie in the sky" proposal was to use folks who are used to looking after 'specials' - isn't there a mainline loco or two already based at Yeovil?

06:50 Yeovil Junction -> 08:33 Swindon
08:45 Swindon -> 10:01 Salisbury
10:11 Salisbury -> 11:33 Swindon
11:45 Swindon -> 13:01 Salisbury
13:11 Salisbury -> 14:33 Swindon
14:45 Swindon -> 16:01 Salisbury
16:11 Salisbury -> 17:33 Swindon
17:45 Swindon -> 19:30 Yeovil Junction

Funnily enough    the Westbury - Salisbury legs are at the "opposite" half hour to the Portsmouth - Cardiff, helping towards the aspiration of a half hourly service on all sections of that line. Some - such as the 13:11 ex Salisbury - take over from an existing service (ex Soton, I believe) potentially releasing that unit to bolster the TransWilts further towards the appropriate level.  I won't go to far down this analysis, as it's based on a difficult path; in reallity you would need several units on an independent fleet in order to always have one in service - I recall FGW^▸ (First Great Western) had a number of Adelantes for just a single diagram as they were phasing them out?   It's also not been checked for single line occupancy, nor for a non-blocking approach from vested interests - better for all to 'work with' those who are already around than to do more than casually speculate about what could be done.

[Coombe Stn]

153318 now back in sevice after trying to do the splits at Long Rock earlier in the year

Been on the Falmouth for the last couple of days

[grahame]

There's what appears to be a similar incident this morning ... and a fresh thread has been started on the subject at

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=7013

Rather than risk confusion between the threads, I'm going to lock this one and invite contributions to the other one ... if anyone has any specific follow up on the earlier incident, though, please let me know so that we can add it here.