I can see what GWR have done with the North Cotswold routes in the afternoon / evening peak - there's still fast GWR services from Reading to Oxford from the 16/12/19 (searched for this date to give me an idea) but a little less direct services.
I think GWR must have had issues with overcrowding and leaving people behind on the current London to the North Cotswolds services so have prioritised these so that they can provide more seats.
Hopefully, unless there's a fault or maintenance requirement, that practically all IET services out of London in the rush hour will be 9 and 10-car!
Unless there's quieter peak time services that can afford to be 5-car worked of course. In the GW franchise book online a few years ago, they said they'd make sure no train in the peak hours (IET services) will be shorter than a 9-car. A bit confusion I think.
At least on the North Cotswolds routes there'll be no more 2 or 3-car Turbo trains, which if I'm honest when working alongside Adelantes and HST's didn't make the 165's and 166's particularly enjoyable when a Turbo substituted for a 125mph train.
The key issue is not about GWR fasts from Reading to Oxford - people who are just making that trip usually head for whatever the first direct train leaving Reading is, which tends to be XC, as those leave and arrive a few minutes ahead of the GWR ones - it is about the people who are going to places on the Cotswold Line beyond Oxford.
At the moment there are six trains leaving Reading between 16.23 and 19.53 that continue beyond Oxford (one terminates at Moreton-in-Marsh, all the rest continue to Great Malvern or Hereford). From December that goes down to three trains, leaving at 16.18, 17.59 and 20.18.
Removing half the service is not my idea of 'a little less'. Especially when the alternative being offered is an indirect journey requiring use of XC trains to Oxford that are already busy enough with people heading for Birmingham and beyond (plus all the existing local passengers for Oxford and Banbury).
As someone who does travel between the Cotswold Line and Reading on a regular basis, I can assure you that there is a well-developed flow of commuter traffic (never mind anyone going to or from all the other places on the GWR, SWR and XC networks served by connecting trains at Reading, or heading to and from Gatwick or Heathrow airports).
Reading is a key commuter destination in its own right these days. There are thousands of square feet of office space a stone's throw from the station, with more on the way, and major businesses like Microsoft's UK headquarters a short shuttle bus ride away at Thames Valley Park. The new Reading Green Park station is being built to serve another major business park.
Your remarks simply reflect the fetishistion of London traffic at the expense of everywhere else that also appears to have swayed the thinking of people at GWR
and Network Rail* when they came up with this timetable.
*As I said above, the draft timetables sent out previously by GWR contained not a hint of what has been done to the afternoon peak Reading calls, so I can only assume the push for all this non-stop running to Oxford has come from Network Rail to make their life easier. It represents a reversal of the structure of the timetable since 2006, which still applies in the mornings, when there will be an excellent direct service available to anyone commuting into Reading from west of Oxford, with every single train towards London calling there.
Overloaded trains are rather less of an issue since the arrival of IETs and 387s has boosted seating capacity in the Thames Valley and beyond. There is no confusion about what rolling stock will be used at certain times of the day, with nine-car IETs (and, I gather, a 2x5 on the first train from Worcester to London from December) booked for all Cotswold Line services into and out of London in the weekday peaks.
There will still be two-car Turbos on the Cotswold Line, as the two peak trains serving the Oxfordshire halts will be worked by them - with the afternoon service (even when truncated to run from Didcot to Moreton-in-Marsh only) likely to be overcrowded all the time as a result, due to the sheer number of people now travelling in and out of Oxford from Hanborough and Charlbury. And some people will no doubt want to connect out of the 16.20 from Paddington to Oxford as well - whether from London or Reading.
Add Reading calls and trains get removed. Simple.
Reading-Cotswold Line remains an easy change at Oxford - I'd wager the number of such passengers with such a relatively minor inconvenience is far less than the number that benefit from the general acceleration of schedules.
If you insist on keeping every aspect of currentll connectivity, you'll just end up back at today's timetable again with no actual progress made.
No, it's not simple. The two draft Cotswold timetables circulated previously to user groups by GWR included Reading calls (and presumably also made provision for the Didcot and Bristol trains).
Is it so hard to grasp that the only part of the the day that the Cotswold Line trains will not call at Reading is the late afternoon and early evening peak? You know, one of the busiest periods of the day, when the inadequate passenger-carrying capacity of the XC trains touted as the alternative way to get to Oxford is even more inadequate than the rest of the time.
Not many people would regard losing a direct journey in exchange for the likelihood of having to stand in a smelly Voyager vestibule for 20 minutes, then change on to a train that has run through the station they got on at, as a 'minor inconvenience'.
The journey time saving between London and Oxford achieved by not calling at Reading will be a whole, er, three or four minutes. Which won't make a fundamental difference to anyone's life.
And what do we find when the peak trains get past Oxford?
The 16.58 from Paddington (no Reading call) will reach Moreton-in-Marsh in 1 hour 22 minutes.
The 17.34 from Paddington (calls at Reading) will reach Moreton-in-Marsh in 1hr 23 mins.
The 17.58 from from Paddington (no Reading call) will reach Moreton-in-Marsh in 1hr 27 mins.
The 18.58 (no Reading call) gets the gold medal for a 1hr 20min run from London.
Not much of a trade-off for the clear and obvious impact on passengers from Reading, or the serious hit to connectivity that will also result from this.