Technical background / history. The feed was set up as something of an experiment, with an anticipated life / usefulness of a few weeks for monitoring some truely dreadful cancellation figures on the TransWilts. It's actually remarkable that there have only been a couple of failures over the years. I don't
think this weekend was one, but there isn't an audit trail that lets me check for this. You will find, though, that it's remarkably kind to
FGW▸ as it does not always report trains that are - at the last minute - stopped short, that are cancelled more that 24 hours in advance, or that are cancelled as part of a general "line shut and chaos all round" scenario. So please treat it with care.
Looking back in researching the feed history, I can across the following quote from when I set it up.
Then on 1st April 2006, the First group took over as the Train Operating Company. The following December they withdrew ALL through trains and left just 2 round trips a day on the Swindon to Westbury section. They did a "consultation exercise" on their draft timetable, but when we asked for the morning service to be a little later than proposed and the evening service a little ealier, they produced a final timetable that did the exact OPPOSITE - a train that starts at 06:19 in the morning, and a second that completes its run at 20:20. "At least you'll see a change in reliability" they said , and we did - for the worse! Monitoring over 2 week periods, up to 40% of the meagre remaining services were cancelled.
... and I have to say that I'm really very disappointed to report that although the reliabillity has changed (to get them a "most improved operator of the year" award), the service they provide remains totally inappropriate for the route / traffic flow ... an appropriate service level that's now been evaluated to be an hourly service in each direction, and that by Network Rail who know a thing or two, and tend to cost things so high and evaluate traffic so low that we can consider the evaluation to be conservative in the extreme.
Enough of the background; I would welcome people's thoughts as to whether the feed, with its limitations, continues to be useful or if we should consider replacing it with a simple link to the FGW home page for the text version. But in answering, do take into account that the FGW home page is a feed too, and that has been down a couple of times over the years as well.
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