I am referring principally to Westbury and Exeter as per topic but Bristol is equally true.
I am sure it is great for passengers, after all they are not paying. As I illustrated for WC it is economic madness and will cost the taxpayer a fortune. The extra demand does not come close to matching the additional costs.
The NR credit card has been revoked and with their debt nearing £50bn, pretty soon reality is going to catch up with the industry.
The solution to empty Pendolinos at 3tph on WC is not to double the number of cabs in the fleet and shorten the trains. The solution to 3hr London Plymouth is not to skip a couple of stations and run one train per 2hr from London to Exeter to cover Castle Cary and Tiverton. 5 cars is not being used to vary off peak train lengths, it is being used to run loss making trains that should not be running at all.
That's one powerful crystal ball you've got there - not one of these additional GWR services has turned a wheel yet but you know they will lose money...
I repeat, what massive ramp-up in services? The semi-fasts will run every couple of hours - that's all. They will provide some consistency in service at the stations between Reading and Taunton, where the key characteristic of the current provision is inconsistency, with some stops provided by the current erratic semi-fast service, with others inserted into Plymouth and Cornwall services, often with large gaps in between.
But I take it that's just fine and dandy in your view and the status quo is all that the passengers will require/deserve. Passengers who most certainly will be paying - through the money taken in taxes that the government puts into the railway and through the fares they pay, fares which now cover about 70% of the network's operating costs, far more than they used to.
What does the Network Rail credit card - otherwise known as part of the national debt, which is what it has always been, whatever clever accountancy and company structure ruses the Government has tried to come up with over the years to pretend otherwise - have to do with a project to deliver new trains?
It was successful in that the core idea of Princess - half hourly services from Birmingham to Newcastle, Reading, Manchester and Bristol are still there today, and in that it increased passenger numbers, yes. There is still insufficient capacity on many XC services, hence my suggesting it wasn't a failure, rather a victim of its own success.
That's not much of a bar for success, when we are still stuck with the same inadequate trains, now partly bailed out, irony of ironies, by a handful of the HSTs that Virgin got rid of a few years earlier, as they were old thinking, from boring old BR - which, for all its faults, never ordered a four-coach train with three ginormous accessible toilets that stink. And probably wouldn't have removed XC services from the second-largest city in the North West or the capital of Wales - I exclude the Cardiff-Nottingham service, as that was not part of XC in the past and doesn't have intercity rolling stock.
Just to be clear, you are saying that it isn't possible to seat over 326 passengers at places like Cheltenham and Worcester without having passengers standing at the London end or going all the way up to a 9-car train?
Just to be clear, do you have any idea of what loadings at Cheltenham and Worcester - or between those places and London - are like? Out in West Wales, I somehow doubt it. Whereas the people at GWR responsible for planning future services do actually have access to information about loadings on their trains and stuff like future housing developments along their routes.
I've told you more times than I care to remember, over several years, that peak HSTs formed of high-density stock, which seat something north of 550 people, are often full when they arrive at Oxford from the west, as are some heading the other way, so I'm afraid a six or seven-coach IEP formation just wouldn't cut it, which is why GWR will use nine-car sets at those times of the day.
If the class 387s etc. aren't going to keep enough short-distance travelers off the IEPs and every IEP out of London needs over 600 seats, then in my opinion an all 9-car fleet it has to be. This would of course result in lots of empty seats on quieter parts of the network, but that would be the case even with 5-car sets available as any demand of 327-567 passengers cannot be accomadated on a single 5-car set and would have to be a 9-car or 2x5-car formation.
If you can keep enough short-distance passengers off the Intercity services out of PAD to allow a number of shorter Intercity services (such as the 180s operated today), then it makes more sense to have a mix of lengths and diagram appropriate length trains to each service.
People have been telling you for years that operating five-car sets makes sense, when diagrammed appropriately. Has the penny finally dropped? Probably not, given what you said immediately above. Having a random series of train lengths does not make sense, with the rationale for using nine-car or 2x5 formations, equalling about 630 seats in both cases, explained above by others.
I must admit that I overlooked that limited enhancement between Cardiff and London, but Swansea already has 2tph to London in the (London) peaks, so only two Welsh stations (Cardiff and Newport) are actually certain to see a frequency enhancement.
No surprise you won't take anything at face value. GWR did not say Cardiff-London. They deliberately chose to say South Wales. Let's see what happens...
You are right, it doesn't mean they need 8 coaches, but it doesn't mean they don't either.
SEWTA thinks they need 8 coaches, all-day on weekends and at peak times on weekdays.
You can say it, SEWTA can say it, doesn't mean an eight-coach train, or nine, is what's actually appropriate all the time - I could demand eight-coach HSTs on every train on the Cotswold Line. But it would be daft.
Personally I still think a frequent EMU fast service Padd-Slough-Reading(-Didcot-Oxford) should operate, with local passengers banned from the fast services entirely, certainly in the peak, following the WCML model. Paths could be found by portion working some fasts as 2x5 splitting along the way.
Please can we not turn this into yet another 'what should be done about Reading commuters' thread. Especially when someone pitches in right from the off with talk of banning people from doing stuff, even though we have yet to see what the GW and Crossrail timetables between Reading and London will actually look like come 2019, never mind the loadings on the various services that will be on offer in the Thames Valley, or ticketing arrangements.
I really believe the rot set in, from the old Bristol TM/Bath/Paddington nonstop service when privatisation split things up between the long distance and the Thames Valley operations, whereupon the long distance operator decided they were going to grab additional revenue for themselves from the regional operator by stopping much more at Reading, Didcot, even Slough. I agree it has become a grand outer-suburban service, but what is poor is that it is provided by long distance trains.
BR had split things up between the long distance and Thames Valley operations when sectorisation was introduced. Reading is now the busiest interchange station in the country after Birmingham New Street and the town is as much a destination for inbound commuting - from every direction, including the east - as it is a source of commuters to London. That's why lots more trains stop there. The revenue was not grabbed off another operator, there was plenty to go around. Didcot's population in the 1991 census was 16,000. It's now 30,000 and rising, so no wonder more trains stop there. The world is changing, the railways do too.
Having 2 x 5 car sets seems to me an ideal approach, but I believe the privatisation financial model doesn't allow for that and we will end up with the 180 saga all over again (remember when those first came along, on Paddington to Bristol) and just have 5 car sets on the whole run because whoever the franchise operator is gets charged by the car by the mile.
Th 180s were acquired by FGW to test the water for an expansion of Bristol and Cardiff services and, despite the iffy reliability, quickly proved that there was a good market there. So much so that by 2004, FGW was acquiring more HSTs to replace them on these jobs, allowing the 180s to be moved to the Cotswold Line.
One difficulty with long distance travellers from Paddington being unable to get seats is the short times now allowed for trains to be opened before departure. Used to be that services to the West etc might be open 30 minutes before leaving, those for Penzance (and Taunton) could take their seats while those for Reading had earlier services, and it was only in the last 10 minutes or so that they "filled in". Not the case any more. Sub-10 minute train openings seem to be becoming more prevalent each year, even on services which have been sat there doing nothing for a long period.
There used to be rather fewer trains operating out of Paddington, so platform occupancy wasn't the issue it is now. Trains 'sat there doing nothing' are being cleaned, catering stores loaded, seat reservations put out...
a much increased Crossrail stopping service that will have their eyes on close headways and exclusive use of the Reliefs
Crossrail will not have exclusive use of the reliefs. GWR will still have two relief line paths per hour in both directions after Crossrail services start.
