Cancelled FGW Trains 2008

[whole diary]

[smokey]

Besides all the Problems of Short Formed Trains, Late Trains, Over-Crowded Trains, Missed Connections, OVER PRICED TICKETS and every shortcoming FGW^▸ (First Great Western) have, isn't the Real Pain in the **** the times that FGW CANCEL YOUR TRAIN, it's alright for FGW control sitting in their warm air con office to cancel trains without a thought, it's not them wanting to get to work or home, standing around in the cold and the wet.

So I say let's bring FGW to account let's list all the Cancelled Trains day by day during 2008, including those that Terminate short or start later, because part of the journey has still been cancelled.

To give an example the St Erth-St Ives Service was cancelled PM on Thursday 27th Dec 07 and AM on Friday 28th, but at 24 trains a day to St Ives and 24 back, that's 48 trains could be cancelled every day (M-F) on that Branch alone.

Now something sinister, I'm led to believe by Railway staff, that when FGW or any other TOC^▸ (Train Operating Company), have problems with Staff, or Trains, as long as SERVICES ARE CANCELLED AT LEAST 24 HOURS before being due to run, such CANCELLED TRAINS ARE NOT TREATED AS CANCELLEDfor purposes of Passenger charter stats. Talk about cooking the books

So Mr Bloggs Waiting for the 06.04 from Alpha to Beta that DIDN'T show, Be happy your train was delisted 36 hours ago, so it DOESN'T MATTER

Let's see for REAL just how many trains ARE cancelled by FGW
YOU GOOD PEOPLE OUT THERE, YOUR INPUT PLEASE
My only concern is from Jan 1st this  brill Coffee shop web site might go into Melt down.

SMOKEY

[Timmer]

It would be useful to have a daily log of cancelled services but that would have to rely on constantly viewing the live updates page on the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) website throughout the day as services get added and deleted as the day progresses. Its something I could do if I wasn't working as I don't think my boss would appreciate me constantly visiting the FGW website to make a note of cancelled services.

If there is a better way of doing this then do post it here.

When there is a whole raft of delays or cancellations, one of us tends to post them on the site to highlight a particular issue.

[grahame]

So I say let's bring FGW^▸ (First Great Western) to account let's list all the Cancelled Trains day by day during 2008, including those that Terminate short or start later, because part of the journey has still been cancelled ...

Now something sinister, I'm led to believe by Railway staff, that when FGW or any other TOC^▸ (Train Operating Company), have problems with Staff, or Trains, as long as SERVICES ARE CANCELLED AT LEAST 24 HOURS before being due to run, such CANCELLED TRAINS ARE NOT TREATED AS CANCELLEDfor purposes of Passenger charter stats. Talk about cooking the books. So Mr Bloggs Waiting for the 06.04 from Alpha to Beta that DIDN'T show, Be happy your train was delisted 36 hours ago, so it DOESN'T MATTER

My only concern is from Jan 1st this  brill Coffee shop web site might go into Melt down.

SMOKEY

It is unlikely that the site would go into meltdown. We grew 38% in October, 17% in November, 25% in December even allowing for the month not yet being completed and the Christmas period - that's in terms or membership.  New topics have risen from 51 in May to 121 in September to 216 (so far) in December.

I share your disquiet at the ability of Train Operating Companies to cancel trains at more than 24 hours notice and have them "whited out" from the statistics.  And I suspect that some of the other things that we see - such as trains running only part of the route, or skipping intermediate stations, reflect in the statistics more positively than should be the case.  So I'm very happy for you to use the board to provide information as to how the system is skewed in this way for the benefit of the TOCs.

But I am going to ask you to refrain from listing every single cancellation on the main boards here.  There are two reasons:

a) The purpose of this board is to provide a useful source of information and discussion across many areas, and listing cancellations, short working, and skipped stations at their current unacceptable levels would lead to this extra "logging" information diluting the information and discussions that people come here for.

b) Whether you like it or not, FGW are going to be our train operator for a long time to come, and there's no major changes that I know of in the pipeline to the Franchise / NR^» (Network Rail - home page) / Local Transport authority structure.   So it's much more effective for places such as this to make reasoned arguments and hard-to-refute suggestions and to help educate everyone concerned than it is for us to act as a knocking shop by overwhelming the place with a majority of posts that are purely negative.

c) (OOps - a third reason) I suspect that it would be a lot of work to list every cancellation and we would end up with something that only picked up a proportion of the problems - and what wonderful publicity that limited cancellation log would be to anyone looking to put a more positive spin than reality on the situation.

If you should set up a separate "cancellation log" page somewhere on the net, I'm sure we would put plenty of links to it from here, mind you  

[grahame]

Smokey, Timmer, others ... for a short period, I have set up a cancellation log page on the Save the Train web site.   It will report on shorter term cancellations, but will not report those which are notified well in advance, I'm afraid.

[swlines]

Graham, I presume that runs as a script just parsing the cancellations page?

[grahame]

Tom ... yes - it is quite easy! But then this is the sort of thing that I do for a living and teach people about ...

[mada]

Tom ... yes - it is quite easy! But then this is the sort of thing that I do for a living and teach people about ...

So Grahame, slightly off topic but is it AJAX and PHP / RSS^▸ (Regional Spatial Strategy) you teach or what?

[Timmer]

Gosh they soon add up don't they and thats not including (superceeded record not included in counts) when I say that. I would assume that FGW^▸ (First Great Western) also have a daily log of services that get altered/cancelled with the reasons why.

[oooooo]

. I would assume that FGW^▸ (First Great Western) also have a daily log of services that get altered/cancelled with the reasons why.

Of course they do!!!

Surely if we are to log it on here to save space would be easier to log services that actually RAN 

[grahame]

... superceeded record not included in counts ....

Those were confusing.  I'm now showing just the latest record for each service with no information at all provided for previous reports for the same service on the same day.

[grahame]

Tom ... yes - it is quite easy! But then this is the sort of thing that I do for a living and teach people about ...

So Grahame, slightly off topic but is it AJAX and PHP / RSS^▸ (Regional Spatial Strategy) you teach or what?

I specialise server side - you'll find me doing PHP and also Perl and Python .... (starting to see a pattern there?) and others - full course index here. RSS comes in to a limited extent together with XML and loads of other things for their use withing the languages rather than courses in their own right ...

[Timmer]

Even BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page) Points West is getting in on the act this morning on the local news section of Breakfast news listing cancellations and even using 'due to a member of train crew being unavailable' as the reason for the cancelation/short working.

[John R]

I've estimated that there are around 400 daily (Mon-Fri) workings for ex Wessex services (this assumes that through workings, such as Cardiff - Portsmouth, Gloucester - Westbury, Paignton - Exmouth count as one service).  So if you look at the cancellations and short workings on these services then I think you'll get a good idea of the problem on the Wessex lines.

 

[John R]

And having looked at yesterday's log, there were 49 (I think) short workings or cancellations on the Wessex lines. So even if I've underestimated the number of services a bit, there were clearly 10%+ of services which didn't run the full course of their journey.

[John R]

I reckon 51 ex Wessex services ran short or cancelled today.  That's 12.5% on my estimate of 400 daily services (might have been a bit lower today because of the bank holiday, which would make the % worse).