Chippenham Sunday Services

[whole diary]

[Timmer]

Heres one for you.

I'd say that Chippenham station would qualify as one of the stations in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) that suffers the most from having it's Sunday services replaced by buses more often than not.

It now seems that if the line is closed between Bristol-Bath, Bath-Chippenham or Chippenham-Swindon, if you are heading in the London direction you will bused to Swindon.

What we are seeing from TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) now is rather than use alternative routes and timetables, as soon as there is engineering work planned for any part of the line, out come the buses which I imagine are either paid for by Network Rail or the rail company who operates on the lines where work is taking place gets compensation. So why would you bother running trains when its probably cheaper to hire a bus?

[John R]

Unfortunately for Chippenham there are two good routes for Bristol trains to get to London which bypass the town. So any one of bit work between Temple Meads and Reading can be easily avoided but will always result in Chippenham losing its service.

[grahame]

Difficult one to measure .... but certainly Chippenham has a history of having (at least some) of its trains replaced by buses on the MAJORITY of weekends.   In one recent year, there were "bustitions" on over 60% of weekends on the "via Westbury" services from there - and that's not even thinking about weekends when there were engineering works on the section via Corsham / Box ... nor weekends when the TransWilts was running to Swindon but services onward to Didcot were diverted.

[Tim]

Slightly off topic I know, but the last two evening services out of London to Both Chippenham and Bath have been replaced by buses from Swindon for about the last 5 years on most nights of teh week.  I realise that engineering work is neccessary but this has been going on for 5 years.  Surely whatever NR^» (Network Rail - home page) are doing ought to have been completed by now.  Does anyone know when the bus replacements will end.

I suspect that they have become a habbit.  NR assumes that they will have an extra three hours every eveneing and FGW^▸ (First Great Western) probably finds i cheaper to hire a couple of coaches than to run the trains.  Using coaches also allows it to close teh stations early

[BandHcommuter]

Slightly off topic I know, but the last two evening services out of London to Both Chippenham and Bath have been replaced by buses from Swindon for about the last 5 years on most nights of teh week.  I realise that engineering work is neccessary but this has been going on for 5 years.  Surely whatever NR^» (Network Rail - home page) are doing ought to have been completed by now.  Does anyone know when the bus replacements will end.

I suspect that they have become a habbit.  NR assumes that they will have an extra three hours every eveneing and FGW^▸ (First Great Western) probably finds i cheaper to hire a couple of coaches than to run the trains.  Using coaches also allows it to close teh stations early

The bus connection to Chippenham and Bath out of the last two weekday Paddington to Bristol services has always been a frequent feature of the service in the 18 years I have been using these trains. I use them probably twice a month, and  I experience the bus substitution on perhaps one occasion in five.  I assume that it makes way for routine maintenance engineering work rather than any specific renewals or improvements. My usual strategy is to check in advance whether it's going to be a through train to Bath, and if not, do a car positioning move to Swindon in the morning.

I don't think there is any financial benefit to FGW in running coaches, since they still have to run the trains through to Bristol on the route via Parkway.

[Shazz]

...and the route via parkway is usually having engineering done on it this time of the year as well.

So its bustitituion from parkway > swindon

[Timmer]

Slightly off topic I know, but the last two evening services out of London to Both Chippenham and Bath have been replaced by buses from Swindon for about the last 5 years on most nights of teh week.  I realise that engineering work is neccessary but this has been going on for 5 years.  Surely whatever NR^» (Network Rail - home page) are doing ought to have been completed by now.  Does anyone know when the bus replacements will end.

I suspect that they have become a habbit.  NR assumes that they will have an extra three hours every eveneing and FGW^▸ (First Great Western) probably finds i cheaper to hire a couple of coaches than to run the trains.  Using coaches also allows it to close teh stations early

only 5 years? Its been going on for well over ten years now its become legendry that one week every month the last two Bristol trains out of Paddington are diverted after Swindon making it a very long trip home if you have to travel on these trains.