Another update, from the BBC:

 

Well that was predictably quick.  Woolston-Hamble-Bursledon....along Southampton Water.   It didn't disappoint and with several stations along the way you can trim your walk according to time/energy level.  Some decent watering holes too.... particularly impressed by The Jolly Sailor, a few minutes from Bursledon Station and tucked away right by the estuary.

 
From the BBC:

 

Not strictly damage to the overheads. 

The pantograph on a train heading into Paddington automatically dropped. This could be due to a defect with the overheads but it could also be a train fault or just a spurious fault.  NR will examine the overheads on the line or lines where the fault occurred as a precaution, especially if the driver can not see any obvious damage to the pantograph on the train. 

 
Woolston station

 
I know - but I'll leave it for a while, to let others have a go.

CfN. 

 
Nice day for a 'station to station' day out... nice station building too...but where is it?

 
Now 20:00
But let’s face it, in a few minutes it will change to ‘until the end of the day’.

 
Cancellations to services between London Paddington and Reading

Following damage to the overhead electric wires at London Paddington all lines are now open.

Disruption is expected until 19:00 22/04.
Train services between London Paddington and Reading may be cancelled, delayed by up to 45 minutes or revised

 

Yes - and the completed list is ...

0 - Bath Spa - Timmer
1 - Clifton Maybank
2 - Oldfield Park - PhilWakely
3 - Truro - old original
4 - Plym Bridge Platform - johnneyw
5 - Cattewater Branch - Chris from Nailsea and Cattewater Junction
6 - Plymouth
7 - approacing Kingswear - GBM
8 - St Budeaux Ferry Road - a-driver
9 - Gunnislake
10 - Southampton Central - Rob T
11 - Thornford - bradshaw

 
They are the carriages behind Goliath on that train approaching Kingswear - yes, "Dave"  is in there!

 
In the afternoon, problems with the halts train:

So the halts train will run, but won't call at the halts and will be non-stop from Oxford to Moreton.

17:50

In consequence,
1P04 13:18 Hereford to London Paddington (16:24) was held at Hayes & Harlington and arrived +55.
The stock from this forms 1W33 16:58 London Paddington to Great Malvern. This departed Paddington +34.
And JourneyCheck has removed the message about stopping at the halts.

Meanwhile, 2E14 17:04 Didcot Parkway to Evesham (18:23) was held outside Oxford, but has now departed +26.
And JourneyCheck has removed the 'not stopping' message.

1P34 15:18 Worcester Foregate Street to London Paddington was held at Reading (+55), arrived +54.
1P05 15:18 Hereford to London Paddington was held at Oxford (+40), arrived Reading +41 and was cancelled thereafter. Stock is running empty to Paddington.

Stock has run empty from Paddington to Reading.

 

pm today: the Dorset/Somerset Air Ambulance was at Warminster (arrived from Swindon), the Wiltshire/Bath aircraft was at Semington (came from Swindon - Refuelling at home base ?), The Great Western aircraft was at Swindon. Busy day !

 

We have "On this day" enteries on the Coffee Shop for 321 of the 366 days of the year - and am amazing clump of "zero" days in late April - I have just added the above for 22nd, but am still missing things for 23rd, 24th, 25th and 27th.  Ideas welcome.

 
On this day - 22nd April. A lot has happened in the world, see https://www.beautifulbritain.co.uk/htm/onthisday/April/e222.htm and
https://www.britannica.com/on-this-day/April-22 but little of it is rail in the South West related.  From this sources:

1833 - The death of Richard Trevithick, Cornish born mining engineer and an early pioneer of steam-powered road and rail transport.

1933 - Sir Frederick Henry Royce, co-founder of the English car company Rolls-Royce, died.

1969 - British yachtsman Robin Knox-Johnston sailed into Falmouth Harbour, completing the first non-stop solo voyage around the world. He was at sea for 312 days. His yacht was named Suhaili which means "good wind".

1972 - Sylvia Cook and John Fairfax became the first people to row across the Pacific Ocean (the world's largest ocean). They arrived in Australia in their boat Britannia after being at sea for 362 days.

2000 - The Big Number Change took place. It was an update of telephone dialling codes in Britain in response to the rapid growth of telecommunications and the impending exhaustion of numbers.

2015 - SouthEastern removed the £10 admin fee from ticket refunds https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/t15662.html

2016 - More than 170 countries signed the Paris Agreement on climate change, a landmark treaty that sought to control and reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere; it took effect in November 2016.

 
Agreed.

Perhaps what the industry could avoid though is the appearance that they're still promoting 'X' as their primary channel for information - the National Rail web site's a case in point and it's a practice that has a very 2012-era vibe. A current example: regarding the issue with the bridge in Cardiff, on the NR disruptions list, the site's (again) advising 'End of the day' and the first source of information offered is a web link to a (hijackable) hashtag on their 'X' feed - so they're linking to something that is no longer a public web site: there's little to no information in the public domain as to what the issue actually is and the time needed for a temporary/permanent fix.

Mark

https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service-disruptions/cardiff-central-20250420/

 

Very much so. It was very interesting to see in the old signal box with a working frame and interlocking, lovingly looked after by an ex-signalman who had worked various of the Exeter boxes early in his career.  Clearly thoroughly enjoying being there - and chatting with old mates and professionals to the exclusion of making the visitors feel like ornaments to be tolerated.

There IS - and I have seen it in much wider arenas - a tendency for customer facing staff (for that's what he was) not to provide the slightly different welcome that's often appropriate for the lone visitor, and perhaps there was an element of that again.  Sorry - but staff and other customers on the national rail network were / are naturally much more engaging in general.   Clearly, exceptions all around; I am just talking a tendency.

 
14:18 Westbury to Swindon due 15:00
14:18 Westbury to Swindon due 15:00 will be cancelled.
This is due to a shortage of train crew.

15:15 Swindon to Westbury due 15:59
15:15 Swindon to Westbury due 15:59 will be cancelled.
This is due to a shortage of train crew.

 
There's a lot of people's energy goes into the UK's heritage railways and some of it must be the sublimated energy from current rail staff that for one reason or another the national rail network cannot utilise. It then has to find a release somewhere else and the heritage railways benefits. That aside, also the sharing of expertise (in both directions) and from time to time outright assistance to the heritage sector as well as commercial tie-ups between the two.

Related to nothing in particular, a photo from 2018 of GWSR's management of lineside vegetation in action. Good to see this especially as it helps maintain a somewhat nutrient-poor grassland habitat. Across the way, a cutting side previously trimmed was a carpet of primroses.

Mark

 

Yes and no - reducing it purely to that is poor - however, to get something out quick when time is of the essence of staff are rushed of their feet makes sense

 
Good point. An issue is the quality, style, and depth of the information that finds its way to rail industry web sites, and the fragmentation of the industry itself.

South Eastern Railways, or was it the part of Network Rail that cares for the track in that part of the world, when something happened that impacted the service, developed the habit of using Twitter to communicate in detail & in an accessible form, as to how a particular issue was being tackled and when something would be fixed, and many people found this genuinely helpful in planning their use of the railway.

Reducing the comms to a template pick-and-mix template message of the sort:

'Due to'... a fault on a train/lack of staff/delay to a previous service ... 'the' {service} 'is' delayed/cancelled/scrapped. 'We're very sorry for the delay.'... is an approach that delivers an information-poor environment to the intending traveller.

Also, starting a sentence with 'Due to' is less than ideal.

Mark

 

Agreed - a single site with web site and app interface to the same data.
Perhaps at a URL like https://www.greatbritishrailways.info


Correct - and especially avoiding a requirement to sign up to a network of private content, especially one that has gained political overtones.  There IS the need to run 24x7 and to be robust and have a findable alternative in the event of IT issues, a need to cope with high volumes, to protect against spam, to make it easy to find what's needed, and to answer both privately where appropriate, and in public where lots of people will have the same questions.

 
Over the last two weekends, I have visited two heritage railways in Devon and Worcestershire - the tiny Plym Valley Railway and the Severn Valley Railway which is one of the biggest. And whilst I enjoyed both days, I'm all the more certain that I'm an enthusiast for rail and other public transport, and I am not a rail enthusiast / train spotter. 

I have great admiration for those who look after and cherish the old trains and buses that bring many of us - myself included - romantic and fond memories but that's not my thing.   I am relieved that I decided not to go on a major heritage train tour over coming weeks, and looking all the more forward to upcoming national and international public transport systems - now and into the future.

Heritage and national public transort provisiders don't really compete. On a technical level, they sometimes share and help with expertise, and on a marketing level they encourage a public interest in one another for the greater good of both.  Sadly, they fail to come together to make best use of common shared infrastucture - the hourly West Midlands train that terminates in Kiddermister does not carry on to Bridgenorth, and in other places with perfectly good if low speed lines, there are not all day, every day passenger services to Swanage, Minehead, Kingswear and Bodmin.  There *are* to Whitby and to Mallaig - it can be done.

What I found interesting on the Severn Valley yesterday, running an intensive service with a train every 35 minutes to Highley with alternate trains extending to Hampton Loade, were:
* The sheer number of staff out these volunteering (a few, I suspect, paid)
* The leisurly schedules - not only slow trains but long waits at loops
* The amount of rolling stock and locos in service and indeed time spend being serviced
* The attitude of some staff - out to enjoy running trains and ignoring those of us paying
* The volume of old railway books an knicknacks on sale to raise money

I conjecture that an hourly service extended from Kiddermister to Bridgenorth, passing the train coming the other way at Arley, could be done in modern terms with 2 dmu units, 2 staff on each, and perhspa a member of staff at Bridgenorth. Just sayin.

I will give the heritage folks a plaudit for their idea of having a counter on a couple of the trains, fixed so that people know where to find it, to serve food and drink.  It beats the wait-for-the-trolley experience. At least on the Severn Valley Railway I was able to go straight up to the counter to learn that they couldn't serve me a coffee because the water wasn't warm enough yet!











and working catering, collected during a 15 minute change at Worcester Foregate Street

 
Seeing the discussion above (and being very glad that our "stay at home over bank holiday weekends" policy was vindicated again!), can I make what might be a controversial suggestion on social media?

If you have a smartphone, and access to social media, you will have access to the train operator's own website and on-line information system. The world of social media is an ever-fragmenting one, making it ever more difficult to keep all their subscribers informed by their means.

So, wouldn't it be sensible for train operators instead to concentrate on keeping their own sites up-to-date (and more importantly, supplied with full and up-to-date information on all train problems, so that (for example) Grahame would have been able to find out whatever caused the two cancellations immediately it happened - or at least have been warned about them in good time.

There's no need for train operators to maintain teams looking after all the various social media outlets, just one well-resourced one supplied with up-to-the-minute information from "Control" and the depots and staff on the ground. Perhaps if there are spare staff as a result, they can be employed in liaising with bus companies and taxi operators to summon help, and perhaps recruiting and running a back up system of out-of-hours emergency services from them run on a retainer contract basis.

There's no reason why anyone should expect X, Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram or any other such service to be a main source of travel information, any more than they should rely on them for up-to-the-minute football scores or commodity market prices. Just have plenty of posters and notices at stations and in trains with the operator's web address - or better still, screens with live information relevant to the site or train in question.

 
A week is a long time in politics ... a quarter hour is a long time in a train service. 20:02, 20:10 and 20:14

 
Gerry Fiennes lives on. Realtime Trains, against the 04:59 Swansea to Paddington today, has:

"This service was cancelled due to an error having been made (OC)."

Mark

 
No problem, I was travelling at the time and couldn't see anyway to upload a picture from a mobile phone so the chap I was travelling with sorted me a link

I can see how to do it on my laptop now

 

I was caught up in the situation last night, trying to catch the 1950 from Plymouth to Swindon direct, initially cancelled from Plymouth onwards when I arrived at the station on foot (about 1920) we were told to catch the 2025 to Exeter, then a service from there to Bristol and then the last train might be held for us there, or taxis etc.
In the end after the train pulled in to Plymouth (about 1944) and everyone got off I noticed at 1956 that the relevant platform departure board was now saying the 1950 to Paddington was going to leave at 1957....then we had an announcement that it was reinstated but would be leaving at about 2010 awaiting the driver....it eventually left at 2025 as the original 2025 to Exeter (coming up from Penzance) was cancelled. In the end I got to Swindon about 40 minutes late.   

 

London residents have the Freedom Pass


There would be an argument for a national freedom pass giving free (really at taxpayers expense) travel by scheduled public road and rail within geographic areas that extend for a minimum of - say - 25 miles (40 kms) from your registered home address.  Note "minimum" - really tuned to include logical geographic areas.

 
Shut all day Tuesday as well.