First Great Western December 2007 Timetable Now Online

[whole diary]

[vacman]

I think every service should stop at all stations aswell, Coombe however is truely a pointless station, it's just as quick to walk from there to Liskeard if you live in the three houses in the stations catchment area!

[grahame]

.... I fail to see why every service on this line cannot be timetabled to stop at every halt on the line ....

The non-stop train makes a connection at Liskeard before it heads down to Looe with a westbound mainline train.  It has 1 minute to turn around at Looe, and I suspect it connects with an Arriva Cross Country train eastbound when it gets back to Liskeard.  Allowing stops at the halts could jeapordise such a connection.

Internal ("working") timetables that I've seen include allowances called "recovery time" within their journeys, which is not necessarily evenly spread but rather is allocated to a part of the journey where a train can be held back for a few minutes to wait for the timetable if it was alraedy running to time.  We don't see the recovery allowances in the Looe service, but if we did they would probably make things a lot clearer.

Final note on recovery allowances - is it my imagination, or do such allowances tend to congregate between the last intermediate stop of a train and its final terminus?  And if they do, would that be for operational reasons, or to help more trains show up as "arrived on time" in the statistics.  One comes to realise just how much slack/recovery is in some schedules when you see a train that started a 2 hour journey 16 minutes late but arrived at the end on time - as I saw on a Westbury to Cheltenham via Swindon the other day.

[Lee]

Another quote from the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) December 2007 Timetable Page :

"The Barnstaple branch line timetable will be available next week."

Why the wait?

[TerminalJunkie]

Another quote from the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) December 2007 Timetable Page :

"The Barnstaple branch line timetable will be available next week."

Why the wait?

North Devon Rail Users Group AGM^▸ (Annual General Meeting) next Friday. We're expecting an announcement

[oooooo]

Final note on recovery allowances - is it my imagination, or do such allowances tend to congregate between the last intermediate stop of a train and its final terminus?  And if they do, would that be for operational reasons, or to help more trains show up as "arrived on time" in the statistics.  One comes to realise just how much slack/recovery is in some schedules when you see a train that started a 2 hour journey 16 minutes late but arrived at the end on time - as I saw on a Westbury to Cheltenham via Swindon the other day.

Extra minutes on the end of a schedule has been common for years. Check out Penzance to St.Erth timings compared with St.Erth to Penzance, especially on the longer distance services. As the lateness of a service is measured just at its destination its just a scam to get more services arriving within 10 minutes late if you ask me!!

As for Coombe on the Looe branch.... Why? Must be the least used station in the south west totally pointless.....

[grahame]

North Devon Rail Users Group AGM^▸ (Annual General Meeting) next Friday. We're expecting an announcement

Hope it goes your way .... I know that the Bristol folks are disappointed that the 40 minute service which was to be provided from December on the Severn Beach line has evaporated. We're disappointed on the TransWilts line that in spite of all the hard work and draft timetables showing 3 extra trains each way daily, they won't be provided after all according to the latest information I have at the moment.

"Fingers crossed" for you on the Tarka^▸ (Line from Barnstaple to Exeter) line.  "Third line lucky"?

[Lee]

As for Coombe on the Looe branch.... Why? Must be the least used station in the south west totally pointless.....

I must admit that I havent found a station in the area that was used less than Coombe in the last couple of years. Here are the figures :

Coombe
2004 / 2005 - 96
2005 / 2006 - 59

Andrew Seedhouse (Government Office Of The South West) once exaggerated this by saying that nobody had used Coombe in the last 6 years. This greatly amused my mother (a Looe Valley Line fan) who makes a point of visiting each station on the branch at least once a year.

[martyjon]

Grahame, I suspect that by your comments that you have never travelled the Looe Line. In my opinion there is no need for any recovery time on this short route whatsoever as the line is almost completely isolated from the rail network.

Once the unit arrives at Liskeard in a morning, the unit would be signalled into the yard and the signalman would then unhook the line staff / token from the nail its hanging on in his signal box and hand it to the guard / conductor. The unit then runs through the yard and onto the branch where it stops. The guard / conductor uses the token to unlock the ground frame and sets the point for the Liskeard platform which is at right angles to the main line platforms. Normally it would not be neccessary to operate this point again until the last journey of the day when the unit is off to the depot for the night.
The only other point at Coombe Junction is also operated using this token. There is no signalling on the line whatsoever.

The only other traffic on this line may be the occasional cement traffic to Moorswater which when run operates during the hours of darkness when there is no passenger services on the line but this traffic is now almost extints if not extinct already.

[Timmer]

Another quote from the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) December 2007 Timetable Page :

"The Barnstaple branch line timetable will be available next week."

Why the wait?

North Devon Rail Users Group AGM^▸ (Annual General Meeting) next Friday. We're expecting an announcement

My guess is you will have a more frequent service in return for having the 142s operating on your line. A fair trade?

[John R]

Although the Looe line runs in isolation, if it's held a few minutes to connect with a late running service on the main line then it will indeed arrive at Looe late, and thus start it's return journey late. Having travelled on the branch the summer before last (when the train was packed), nobody used any of the intervening stations, and looking at an O/S map it's hardly surprising. So I guess the timetabling is designed to ensure that the 99% of passengers using it (ie to/from Looe) get the best service and connections by introducing an element of robustness.

Mind you, it was better when it was an hourly service, though the timings were incredibly tight, particularly when the trains were packed out, given the loading and unloading times.

[Graz]

I've had a flick through the Bristol one- some improvements to note such as direct Oldfield Park/Keynsham to Brighton services again, hourly services to both these stations, (cheer!) and unless my eyes deceive me, all Portsmouth-Cardiff services are stopping at Bradford-on-Avon, something I thought would never happen.

A real shame about Melksham though, we've seen plenty of other improvements- why not one of the most needed services in the region. And it appears there are no services to Mottisfont & Dunbridge, Dean, or Pilning on this timetable.

[TerminalJunkie]

[Barnstaple to Exeter]
My guess is you will have a more frequent service in return for having the 142s operating on your line. A fair trade?

A fair trade? That rather depends how many extra services there are; and since half-hourly isn't possible, the answer is no

[grahame]

A real shame about Melksham though, we've seen plenty of other improvements- why not one of the most needed services in the region. And it appears there are no services to Mottisfont & Dunbridge, Dean, or Pilning on this timetable.

Bradford-on-Avon, yes, good news.It's a town that's just half the size of Melksham and now has two services each way per hour (as opposed to two each way per DAY) .... talk of unbalanced treatment.  And, yes, Melksham and the TransWilts do need services.

You ask "Why Not?".   I'm not 100% certain - FOI^▸ (Freedom of Information) has shown us all the plans but I'm not clear as to why they were dropped.  If I had cynicalitis this morning, I might take Andrew Seedhouse from GOSW^» (Government Offices South West - about) words and describe the situation as the powers that be "managing expectitions" by waving a carrot at us and only pulling it away when it's too late for us to call "foul".   Persoanlly, I think the jury's out on that - I simply don't know.    But there is a pattern forming.   Great hopes came to nowt before the frachise was let in 2005.   Hopes that FGW^▸ (First Great Western) would do something as a result of the consultation inputs in 2006 resulted in the draft timetables being changed for the worse, and now this debacle in 2007.  "Be patient - we'll do something for December 2008" is now the story - "these things take time and you can't expect it overnight".

Mottisfornt and Dean are now servered by a (near) hourly SWT^▸ (South West Trains) service, and the draft timetables are purely for FGW.  So Salisbury - Southampton looks thin when, in fact, there's a lot more services there.  In particular, the FGW trains that terminate at Southampton are running shortly before / after SWT trains that call at Mottisfont and Dean in each case.

The drafts are Monday to Friday only, so unless there was an improvement at Pilning I would not expect to see any services shown.  IMHO^▸ (in my humble opinion) it's a shame they don't publish / consult on weekend and Sunday services, especially as Sunday evening is the busiest time of the week for long distance travel.

[Lee]

Anyone noticed the 90 minute gap in services from / to Bridgwater and Highbridge & Burnham (between the 0836 and 1007 departures from Taunton and the 0821 and 1003 Taunton arrivals) ?

[Lee]

Here is the view from I Hate First Great Western (thanks for the plug , Helen.)
http://ihatefirstgreatwestern.blogspot.com/2007/10/merry-christmas-from-first-great.html