The Elizabeth Line core was brilliant when it was opened. Even with 5 minutes between trains it was almost viable as turn-up-and-go as almost without fail they turned up, on time.
The operative word here is - was. The moment it was connected up beyond Paddington it was ruined.
Even with a higher frequency, just using the core bit has become a turn-up-and-hope lottery like anything else to do with Paddington. Maybe I've been unlucky, but in the last few weeks getting on for 50% of various attempts to use it have been a mess, in several cases requiring abandoning it and running to the nearest grindingly slow tube alternative. 10, 15 minute gaps between services on the core (completely useless in context), everything suddenly coming to a complete halt, PIS bearing no relation to what happens, trains disappearing off the system at the last moment etc. This makes it doubly aggravating that Delay Repay cannot be claimed when this results in repeatedly being delayed by 30-60 minutes getting back to the west. It's back to scanning RTT and the TfL Tube Status pages, formulating multiple contingency plans depending on what shambles seems to be occurring today, factoring in waste of precious time to add padding, all the familiar aggravation.
As far as I'm concerned it would be better running as a shuttle between Stratford/Abbey Wood and Paddington as it actually worked when confined to its own infrastructure. I realise that pretty much defeats the broader object of it, but it was nice to have one example of something that works properly somewhere in the country...
Meanwhile the infrastructure on the mainline between Paddington and Reading has failed over and over and over recently. I've lost count of the number of overhead line failures causing major disruption and it's no longer just the old bit east of Heathrow either. It seems that the newer heavy duty Meccano kit had a reliable lifetime of about 5 years despite being built like a tank...
The age of the infrastructure argument makes no sense to me. Surely the only thing left from the Brunel era is bridges and embankments and the like. Every bit of the track, signalling, electrification, all the relevant station infrastructure has been replaced over and over again. The reason it's intensively used is because the demand is huge - and therefore so is the revenue attributable to that stretch. Why is it so hard to maintain it properly given its exceptionally high economic value?