GWR Shortage of Traincrew Weekend and During Week

[Mag_seven]

Fine, now add in all the Network Rail staff that you will also need to include and tell me who will pay for it? It certainly won't be the government or the rail companies, so they only people left are YOU the passengers, and enough of them already complain about high fares!

And I note that you have conveniently ignored the question about who pays for any of this!

So let me get this right - in your view the fare paying customer should have to pay more simply to get the Sunday service that GWR and other operators are currently obliged to provide?

 

[Deafdoggie]

Who else is going to pay for it?

 

[JN114]

And I can assure you that there are staff shortages in the signalling grades and lines have had to be closed at short notice because of this.

In 4 years of working in control I can tell you the exact date of the one and only time on our route in that time that a shortage of available signalling staff has caused a line closure.

You’re comparing apples and the Swiss Navy.

 

[Llanigraham]

So let me get this right - in your view the fare paying customer should have to pay more simply to get the Sunday service that GWR and other operators are currently obliged to provide?

Well who else is going to pay for it? It certainly won't be the government.

 

[Dai Corner]

In 4 years of working in control I can tell you the exact date of the one and only time on our route in that time that a shortage of available signalling staff has caused a line closure.

You’re comparing apples and the Swiss Navy.

The day in Sept 2016 when they couldn't cover a job at TVSC and Paddington was at a standstill for several hours? I didn't mind, I was travelling from Plymouth to Exeter on what should have been the Newquay and expecting to stand. Instead the train started from Plymouth and I got a coach more or less to myself.

 

[Llanigraham]

Why?
Surely the signalling staff are employed by NR, on completely different contracts.

We may be employed by NR but we also don't have Sundays in our rostered week, and work them as overtime.
I can assure you that there have been numerous Sundays where cover has been difficult to find, and I can think of at least one occasion where a line has had to close because a Box didn't open on a Sunday morning.

 

[JN114]

The day in Sept 2016 when they couldn't cover a job at TVSC and Paddington was at a standstill for several hours? I didn't mind, I was travelling from Plymouth to Exeter on what should have been the Newquay and expecting to stand. Instead the train started from Plymouth and I got a coach more or less to myself.

There’s more to that one that met the eye - it wasn’t really a lack of available staff that caused it, let’s put it that way. It’s old news, and probably way outwith the scope of this thread.

The issue at hand - a non availability of staff on weekend - has only caused one line closure on Western Route in the past 4 years. From that we can deduce that Sunday working agreements in NR aren’t really a problem on the scope that perhaps they arguably are at GWR; and thus not really within the scope of this thread. Certainly not to the extent that any “deal” with GWR traincrew should be expanded to include employees of an entirely different company.

 

[father_jack]

The Marches suffer from sporadic box closures with the LOM getting called out to work the box which is all good and fine until there's an incident.

 

[cactustwirly]

Well who else is going to pay for it? It certainly won't be the government.

The TOCs, these services are in their franchise agreement

 

[Mag_seven]

The TOCs, these services are in their franchise agreement

Indeed - the money can come out of First Group's profits.

 

[Wilts Wanderer]

Indeed - the money can come out of First Group's profits.

I’m not sure there is such a thing at the moment! £326M loss for the last financial year...

 

[Llanigraham]

Indeed - the money can come out of First Group's profits.

Did they make a profit on their railway enterprises?

 

[Kite159]

Looks like another chaotic Sunday, so far on journey check 8 services are cancelled outright with 24 other updates.

Cardiff - Portsmouth/Brighton seems to be hard hit today

 

[PHILIPE]

Looks like another chaotic Sunday, so far on journey check 8 services are cancelled outright with 24 other updates.

Cardiff - Portsmouth/Brighton seems to be hard hit today

It is Regional services that affected today rather than HSS. Points to conductor shortages as 0908 Portsmouth Hbr to Cardiff ran ECS to Westbury so obviously driver available.

 

[jimm]

Slightly puzzled about why the GWR haters have yet to pop up demanding that Chiltern's management team should be fired after this litany of cancellations due to crew shortages today...

From http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=18624.0

09:43 London Marylebone to Banbury due 11:02
11:43 Banbury to London Marylebone due 13:07
14:57 London Marylebone to Aylesbury Vale Parkway due 16:03
15:32 Leamington Spa to Stratford-Upon-Avon due 16:08
16:13 Aylesbury Vale Parkway to London Marylebone due 17:20
16:29 Aylesbury to London Marylebone due 17:36
16:41 Stratford-Upon-Avon to Leamington Spa due 17:17
16:48 Aylesbury to London Marylebone due 17:50
18:06 London Marylebone to Oxford due 19:10
18:35 London Marylebone to Oxford due 19:38
18:43 London Marylebone to Banbury due 20:04
18:48 Aylesbury to London Marylebone due 19:50
19:06 London Marylebone to Oxford due 20:10
19:32 Leamington Spa to Stratford-Upon-Avon due 20:10
19:42 Oxford to London Marylebone due 20:48
19:46 London Marylebone to Gerrards Cross due 20:19
20:11 Oxford to London Marylebone due 21:18
20:13 London Marylebone to Aylesbury due 21:21
20:35 London Marylebone to Oxford due 21:39
20:42 Oxford to London Marylebone due 21:47
20:42 Stratford-Upon-Avon to Leamington Spa due 21:17
20:45 Banbury to London Marylebone due 22:07
20:49 Gerrards Cross to London Marylebone due 21:32
21:29 Aylesbury to London Marylebone due 22:36
21:32 Leamington Spa to Stratford-Upon-Avon due 22:10
21:57 London Marylebone to Aylesbury Vale Parkway due 23:03
22:06 London Marylebone to Oxford due 23:09
22:09 Oxford to London Marylebone due 23:28
22:15 Stratford-Upon-Avon to Banbury due 23:02
22:27 London Marylebone to Aylesbury Vale Parkway due 23:33
22:57 London Marylebone to Aylesbury Vale Parkway due 00:03
23:10 London Marylebone to Oxford due 00:18
23:18 Oxford to Bicester Village due 23:36

And two more added later on Chiltern's Journeycheck page

00:10 London Marylebone to Banbury due 01:44
01:09 Princes Risborough to Aylesbury due 01:30

Plus 11 Sunday cancellations already notified on Journeycheck.

 

[Tim456]

My answer to that would be if Chiltern listed cancellations weekend after weekend like GWR have been since summer last year, then I’m sure comments would soon start being made.

Having said that, no it’s not been a good day if you’re a passenger on Chiltern.

 

[1e10]

Slightly puzzled about why the GWR haters have yet to pop up demanding that Chiltern's management team should be fired after this litany of cancellations due to crew shortages today...

Either way you're not going to find any mention of Chiltern disruption in this thread..

 

[geoffk]

Fine, now add in all the Network Rail staff that you will also need to include and tell me who will pay for it? It certainly won't be the government or the rail companies, so they only people left are YOU the passengers, and enough of them already complain about high fares!

Northern is cancelling around 80 trains tomorrow (5th August) and it is likely to end up being more. Cancellations are all in the north-west and include the entire Liverpool - Manchester Airport service and half of the trains between Liverpool and Wigan. Again, this is because "staff have made themselves unavailable for work". (Sorry, I know this is a GWR thread).

 

[Kite159]

So far, 10 cancelled trains showing for today, mostly High Speed services. Plus 6 part cancellations, including a Gatwick - Reading which is only running to Redhill.

Usual Sunday so far then.

 

[jimm]

My answer to that would be if Chiltern listed cancellations weekend after weekend like GWR have been since summer last year, then I’m sure comments would soon start being made.

Having said that, no it’s not been a good day if you’re a passenger on Chiltern.

Nor was it on Friday actually, where there were also a number of crew-related cancellations.

And that GW Passengers' Forum thread is a revival of one from last August bank holiday weekend, where there were a lot of cancellations on Chiltern due to train crew shortages.

Chiltern's service also melted down on Wednesday afternoon last week due to a a bridge bash and points failure at Wembley depot - but as it's Chiltern, where nothing ever goes wrong, when it does, it often seems to go under the radar.

We have been treated to lots of predictions here and elsewhere online - usually made after Sundays with dozens of GWR cancellations - that the school summer holiday period would be even worse.

Except, er, it isn't. Indeed the past couple of weekends have seen far fewer cancellations than earlier in the year.

And those of us who dared to suggest that when GWR got caught up with crew training on new/transferred rolling stock - in the case of IETs supposed to start last May but did not start until last September - things might improve at a rate of knots were howled down.

We have also been told umpteen times that GWR ought to employ more staff, never mind that it actually has a record number of drivers on the books at the moment.

And that if the md/the entire senior management team was fired, then that would somehow solve all issues at a stroke. No idea how that would address things like Network Rail telling GWR at 5pm one Friday afternoon in May what trains they could run over the weekend due to short-notice engineering work, long after traincrew had been notified about working that weekend.

Chiltern, with its own private train set south of Banbury, settled service pattern and settled rolling stock fleet, has none of those things to contend with - and yet there are 23 cancellations and three shortened journeys so far today on top of 30+ cancellations and other alterations yesterday. I don't know how that works out as a proportion of trains that are timetabled to run, but surmise it is a rather higher percentage than on GWR's more complicated operation, even on days when way more services have not run.

 

[gallafent]

I don't know how that works out as a proportion of trains that are timetabled to run, but surmise it is a rather higher percentage than on GWR's more complicated operation, even on days when way more services have not run.

http://trains.im/ppm/ is a useful resource to explore to find that out (although sometimes doesn't provide up to the minute information). I can't vouch for the accuracy of its data of course (not my site and I don't know the internals of how the data flow).

It looks from there as if Chiltern managed 94.5% of services “on time” yesterday (with 1.3% very late or cancelled), compared to GWR's 84.4% (with 4.4% very late or cancelled). On that basis a much smaller proportion of trains run by Chiltern were affected by problems yesterday than were on GWR's network. One can even drill down to “routes” (although I don't know how to find out which specific services correspond to which route name), and from that it looks as if Chiltern's worst affected services were “Joint” (whatever that means!) (92.3%), whereas GWR's worst were “South Wales - South Coast” (61.7%).

 

[JN114]

Although that’s far more all-encompassing than the point jimm was trying to make.

Anecdotally, Chiltern had more cancellations and alterations to their services due to “Crew Shortages” yesterday than GWR, despite running fewer services overall - thus a greater percentage of their services were affected by crew shortages.

Jimm’s point is, as I read it, where is the outrage and calls for senior Chiltern management to be sacked; given this also isn’t exactly a one off occurrence for them - in much the same manner that earlier posters were decrying the lack of media coverage of GWR’s issues a few weeks/months ago.

There is no denying Chiltern have considerably better overall performance than GWR - they effectively have their own private railway south of Banbury, and thus don’t inherit all the delays of other operators. The signalling system is modern enough to be highly reliable, but old enough to be in the mature, level, middle ground of the bathtub model. But to imply GWRs high-80s PPM is because of crew shortages is disingenuous at best.

“Joint” services on Chilterns patch I understand are the ones that operate over the Metropolitan line.

 

[jimm]

http://trains.im/ppm/ is a useful resource to explore to find that out (although sometimes doesn't provide up to the minute information). I can't vouch for the accuracy of its data of course (not my site and I don't know the internals of how the data flow).

It looks from there as if Chiltern managed 94.5% of services “on time” yesterday (with 1.3% very late or cancelled), compared to GWR's 84.4% (with 4.4% very late or cancelled). On that basis a much smaller proportion of trains run by Chiltern were affected by problems yesterday than were on GWR's network. One can even drill down to “routes” (although I don't know how to find out which specific services correspond to which route name), and from that it looks as if Chiltern's worst affected services were “Joint” (whatever that means!) (92.3%), whereas GWR's worst were “South Wales - South Coast” (61.7%).

Excuse me, where did I say anything about any of that lot?

I was not talking about 'problems' or on time or late running, I was talking about the proportion of cancellations out of services planned.

There appears to be something not quite right with the Chiltern figure for yesterday, given that the 'useful resource' says that on Friday, very late or cancelled was 10% - a day when there were some crew issues but not as many as yesterday - and for yesterday's service on the Oxford route it says there were no cancellations or very late services, when there are 11 cancellations listed above.

So far today, it says the very late or cancelled figure on Chiltern is running at 28.8%, while GWR is at 7.2%.

 

[gallafent]

Excuse me, where did I say anything about any of that lot

I was picking up on your observation upthread about people “picking on” GWR, and your question of why they weren't talking about Chiltern's problems on Sunday. You summarised the number of cancellations and other major alterations on Chiltern that day, and suggestsed that this was worse than GWR's, then questioning why people didn't pick on Chiltern today instead of GWR. The best data I could find indicated that Chiltern's service was running a lot better than GWR's that day, and so regardless of the cause of those problems, the service wasn't bad enough to get such people sufficiently angry to start demanding heads on sticks.

I wasn't trying to imply that all (or even most) of the causes of GWR's lower PPM are staff-shortage related, just that it's the overall quality of service that gets people angry, and when a particular aspect of the cause for that is highlighted, people will home in on that and demand changes.

It might well be the case that a higher proportion of Chiltern's problems that day were due to staff shortages than GWR's problems that day were, but without deeper analysis I can't tell. In any case, the fact that one company is failing in a certain way does not mean that another is not, the two are not related. Chiltern's failure to employ or manage sufficient quantities of staff correctly does not negate GWR's failure to do so.

Next two paragraphs drift well off-topic, would probably be better off in the “decline” thread, but I'll leave them here for now (happy to move them across if felt more appropriate).

As a passenger on GWR, as far as I'm concerned /all/ delays and cancellations are the fault of GWR. That's the deal, with a private company. I do not have any contract with GWR's upstream suppliers, contractors and employees, and as such, the failure of GWR to provide me with a service is GWR's alone. I don't care a flying squirrel about what internal problems GWR has, those are GWR's to deal with. Watching GWR being repeatedly given uncontested franchise extensions while its parent makes large profits and the service declines does not add to my sangfroid, although there's a certain schadenfreude in reading in the FT article referenced below about the current large losses and drop in its share price, I suppose.

I note from https://www.ft.com/content/5500ef28-6499-11e8-a39d-4df188287fff (behind a paywall I'm afraid, but as long as you haven't read that much of the FT this week/month it should let you sample it) regarding a top-level resignation: «“We are happy that he’s gone,” said a top-20 investor, who added that they had faith in Mr Hauser. “This company is woefully undermanaged.” An analyst, who asked not to be named, said: “I’m surprised he didn’t go three years ago, frankly.”»

I was not talking about 'problems' or on time or late running, I was talking about the proportion of cancellations out of services planned.

I'd say that a high proportion of cancellations is a 'problem'.

As a non-insider, I don't have straightforward access to the difference between “the proportion of cancellations out of services planned” and the “very late or cancelled” figure from the ppm data, so that's the best I could manage. Clearly it would be possible to extract it (somewhat laboriously or by writing appropriate software) from the real time information feeds, but I'm not aware of a resource that does so and publishes cancellation numbers (with cause) by operator.

There appears to be something not quite right with the Chiltern figure for yesterday, given that the 'useful resource' says that on Friday, very late or cancelled was 10% - a day when there were some crew issues but not as many as yesterday - and for yesterday's service on the Oxford route it says there were no cancellations or very late services, when there are 11 cancellations listed above.

Interesting, and as I said before it seems sometimes not up to date … I wonder if it ends up with gaps in its data which distort the numbers, when it's “lost the feed” for a period (i.e. it doesn't manage to fill it in). It would be good if it could indicate the proportion of services for the day for which it has any data, since clearly if that's low than that devalues the figures presented there. If there's anywhere with more reliable publicly available information summaries about train running, then that would be good to know about

 

[gallafent]

Although that’s far more all-encompassing than the point jimm was trying to make.

Anecdotally, Chiltern had more cancellations and alterations to their services due to “Crew Shortages” yesterday than GWR, despite running fewer services overall - thus a greater percentage of their services were affected by crew shortages.

I get that, hope I addressed it in my other post — the reason people aren't storming the Bastille is that overall the service was still not too bad. It's all about tipping points I guess.

Jimm’s point is, as I read it, where is the outrage and calls for senior Chiltern management to be sacked; given this also isn’t exactly a one off occurrence for them - in much the same manner that earlier posters were decrying the lack of media coverage of GWR’s issues a few weeks/months ago.

I expect those demands are alive and well on Twitter, in both cases, of course

I'm starting to feel the need to write a horrible piece of software to pull down realtime running figures and graph delays sliced by cause as well as by amount

There is no denying Chiltern have considerably better overall performance than GWR - they effectively have their own private railway south of Banbury, and thus don’t inherit all the delays of other operators. The signalling system is modern enough to be highly reliable, but old enough to be in the mature, level, middle ground of the bathtub model. But to imply GWRs high-80s PPM is because of crew shortages is disingenuous at best.

That was never my intention, and I apologise if it was inferred that this is what I meant. I was only trying to look at the “why no rabble at the gates” question.

“Joint” services on Chilterns patch I understand are the ones that operate over the Metropolitan line.

Aha, OK, I wondered about that, but there's also a category “Met” in their breakdown, which is what puzzled me! http://trains.im/ppm/CH

 

[jimm]

I was picking up on your observation upthread about people “picking on” GWR, and your question of why they weren't talking about Chiltern's problems on Sunday. You summarised the number of cancellations and other major alterations on Chiltern that day, and suggestsed that this was worse than GWR's, then questioning why people didn't pick on Chiltern today instead of GWR. The best data I could find indicated that Chiltern's service was running a lot better than GWR's that day, and so regardless of the cause of those problems, the service wasn't bad enough to get such people sufficiently angry to start demanding heads on sticks.

I wasn't trying to imply that all (or even most) of the causes of GWR's lower PPM are staff-shortage related, just that it's the overall quality of service that gets people angry, and when a particular aspect of the cause for that is highlighted, people will home in on that and demand changes.

It might well be the case that a higher proportion of Chiltern's problems that day were due to staff shortages than GWR's problems that day were, but without deeper analysis I can't tell. In any case, the fact that one company is failing in a certain way does not mean that another is not, the two are not related. Chiltern's failure to employ or manage sufficient quantities of staff correctly does not negate GWR's failure to do so.

The point I was making was that GWR's problems were not per se to do with a supposed 'shortage' of staff - which hardly squares with them having a record number of drivers on their books, does it?

There were and still are all sorts of other factors - such as a substantial proportion of that record number of drivers having to be trained on new/cascaded rolling stock - some of them have been doing that training on what were supposed to be rest days on weekdays, so having done that they are hardly likely to volunteer to turn out on a Sunday as well - and when you lose four months of the IET training programme, as happened last summer due to technical issues that were a matter for Network Rail and Hitachi - not GWR, as not a single train had been handed over for service by Hitachi at the time - there was only ever likely to be one outcome and GWR and its passengers have had to suffer the consequences ever since.

Chiltern does not have any of those other issues affecting it - not even a sniff of engineering work, whereas the GWR site is already showing further projects affecting the area through to next March.

As a passenger on GWR, as far as I'm concerned /all/ delays and cancellations are the fault of GWR. That's the deal, with a private company. I do not have any contract with GWR's upstream suppliers, contractors and employees, and as such, the failure of GWR to provide me with a service is GWR's alone. I don't care a flying squirrel about what internal problems GWR has, those are GWR's to deal with. Watching GWR being repeatedly given uncontested franchise extensions while its parent makes large profits and the service declines does not add to my sangfroid, although there's a certain schadenfreude in reading in the FT article referenced below about the current large losses and drop in its share price, I suppose.

Which is hardly a rational or reasonable view to take.

GWR can't operate in the way that a 'private' company in the accepted sense of the word would. It has to abide by all manner of requirements dictated by the DfT and only has one infrastructure provider available to it - the supposedly privatised railway is currently subject to far more micro-management from DfT than the nationalised British Rail ever was.

If you can explain how GWR's managers are supposed to solve the many infrastructure issues that are down to Network Rail, I'm sure GWR would be delighted to hear from you.

Also maybe you can help them with how to plan a weekend train service when staff have to be notified about their shifts on a Tuesday and Network Rail does not give the TOC information about what services can operate, due to a late-notice engineering block, until the end of a Friday afternoon.

I don't throw a fit every time the Aldi round the corner has no milk on the shelves as a result of the Muller dairy lorry failing to turn up, which has now happened three times in the past few weeks. But apparently I should, as it is clearly Aldi's fault and no one else's...

I would hardly describe a couple of franchise extensions so far as "repeatedly", especially amid a mountain of electrification and resignalling work and with new trains and cascades all over the place - never mind DfT's inability to actually deliver completed franchise bidding rounds. A direct award from next year onwards for GWR has yet to be concluded and, as we saw in the case of SWT, there is no guarantee an agreement will be reached on a direct award.

If First Group is this runaway profit machine you describe, why is it struggling financially and apparently looking to sell bits of itself?

I'd say that a high proportion of cancellations is a 'problem'.

As a non-insider, I don't have straightforward access to the difference between “the proportion of cancellations out of services planned” and the “very late or cancelled” figure from the ppm data, so that's the best I could manage. Clearly it would be possible to extract it (somewhat laboriously or by writing appropriate software) from the real time information feeds, but I'm not aware of a resource that does so and publishes cancellation numbers (with cause) by operator.

It is just as much a problem on Chiltern as any other TOC, yet GWR, Southern, Northern et al get pilloried on this forum for almost any and every cancellation these days, but the saintly Chiltern would probably have escaped attention this weekend had I not mentioned it.

Interesting, and as I said before it seems sometimes not up to date … I wonder if it ends up with gaps in its data which distort the numbers, when it's “lost the feed” for a period (i.e. it doesn't manage to fill it in). It would be good if it could indicate the proportion of services for the day for which it has any data, since clearly if that's low than that devalues the figures presented there. If there's anywhere with more reliable publicly available information summaries about train running, then that would be good to know about

If the 30+ cancellations had accounted for just 1.3% of Chiltern services yesterday (given there was little sign of any very late running on realtimetrains), it would have to have been planning to run somewhere north of 3,000 services - there are about 24,000 operating on the entire network on a typical day and I don't think Chiltern is running that large a proportion of them.

Hence my surmise that the actual proportion of cancelled services yesterday was higher than on GWR - and as things stand with a handful of services still to operate today, the cancellation percentage is indeed higher than on GWR, albeit the gap has narrowed since the morning. It looks like Chiltern got some people to turn out to act as guards north of Banbury later in the day, allowing a number of services they had expected to cancel to operate in the end.

 

[Parallel]

The issue is that GWR have a much bigger network, so, Chiltern may proportionately have more disrupted services, but GWR have a much wider reach with more people on and using the network. Long distance services and also plenty of connecting services across their network. It is easier to have a bigger impact on a larger volume of passengers and easier for disruption to escalate, even if individual services run to time. i.e someone travelling from Paddington to Looe. Faulty aircon/no seat reservations on their first leg plus a minor delay means they have to sit around at Liskeard for an hour. Minor delay may not be GWR’s fault - but they’re what the average Joe sees on the sides of the trains and at the station. They will then sit at the station feeling frustrated as they haven’t had the service they were expecting.

A reason why I don’t normally mention Chiltern is because I don’t live on their network, and don’t have to deal with their late running/cancelled trains every day. If there was a suitable alternative for getting to/from work, I would take it - and that’s a shame as I am a rail enthusiast. GWR/FGW have never been popular around the Bristol area, not forgetting the fare strike about 10 years ago and they’ve never been able to shake off the ‘delayed cattle truck conditions’ tag, and now it is frequently crippled on weekends by a shortage of traub crew. I think the service leaves a lot to be desired, whether that’s from GWR, Network Rail, the DfT, or a mixture.

The SW is a lovely part of the country, and rail has huge scope for growth, but just feels like it’s not taken seriously by passengers, TOCs (not just GWR - XC too) and the government. We’ll see what happens on the run up to 2020, On going projects such as the Filton quad-tracking will help ease congestion, and hopefully the full quota of PRM compliant trains will be in service. Maybe one day the staff issue will be tackled too.

 

[WelshBluebird]

GWR/FGW have never been popular around the Bristol area, not forgetting the fare strike about 10 years ago and they’ve never been able to shake off the ‘delayed cattle truck conditions’ tag, and now it is frequently crippled on weekends by a shortage of traub crew.

The thing is, I think they were starting to get somewhere. Certainly things were no where near as bad as ten years ago, and at least with the people I know, they certainly saw things improving.
And then came the "more trains in for repair than usual" and the regular short formations / cancellations of local / regional services, and then came the introduction of the IEP's / withdrawal of the HST's which has caused the regular short formations / cancellations of the long distance services, and the reputation is back down alongside the worst it has been.

 

[jimm]

The issue is that GWR have a much bigger network, so, Chiltern may proportionately have more disrupted services, but GWR have a much wider reach with more people on and using the network. Long distance services and also plenty of connecting services across their network. It is easier to have a bigger impact on a larger volume of passengers and easier for disruption to escalate, even if individual services run to time. i.e someone travelling from Paddington to Looe. Faulty aircon/no seat reservations on their first leg plus a minor delay means they have to sit around at Liskeard for an hour. Minor delay may not be GWR’s fault - but they’re what the average Joe sees on the sides of the trains and at the station. They will then sit at the station feeling frustrated as they haven’t had the service they were expecting.

A reason why I don’t normally mention Chiltern is because I don’t live on their network, and don’t have to deal with their late running/cancelled trains every day. If there was a suitable alternative for getting to/from work, I would take it - and that’s a shame as I am a rail enthusiast. GWR/FGW have never been popular around the Bristol area, not forgetting the fare strike about 10 years ago and they’ve never been able to shake off the ‘delayed cattle truck conditions’ tag, and now it is frequently crippled on weekends by a shortage of traub crew. I think the service leaves a lot to be desired, whether that’s from GWR, Network Rail, the DfT, or a mixture.

The SW is a lovely part of the country, and rail has huge scope for growth, but just feels like it’s not taken seriously by passengers, TOCs (not just GWR - XC too) and the government. We’ll see what happens on the run up to 2020, On going projects such as the Filton quad-tracking will help ease congestion, and hopefully the full quota of PRM compliant trains will be in service. Maybe one day the staff issue will be tackled too.

So what if GWR has a bigger network? If they cancelled 10 per cent of their services on a given day due to staff shortages, we know full well that the usual suspects would be popping up here and elsewhere demanding mass dismissals of management.

I use GWR a lot and I use Chiltern on a good few occasions, so I know full well that they can both have stinking rotten days - but Chiltern all too often seem to escape attention when this happens - unlike GWR, where we still have people banging on here about short-formed IETs - despite knowing full well GWR is short of four sets for reasons that are outside their control.

There are plenty of people living along the Chiltern Line who have no realistic alternative to using its services, and many in Buckinghamshire in particular who feel they have been neglected at the expense of expansion to Oxford and Birmingham and also taken for a ride over fares, given some of the advances offered to and from places further north - or at Bicester, where their fares are just 10p less than Oxford Parkway and where they get to pay £8 in the peak to park for the day, while Oxford Parkway is just £2 to park all day, thanks to the charge at the adjacent bus park-and-ride site.

FGW was left short of rolling stock for the West in 2006 because someone at the DFT told them they did not need to have all the dmus that Wessex Train has been using in the previous franchise (hence the pictures of assorted units dumped at Eastleigh at the start of 2007) and has been playing catch-up ever since. So hardly the fault of FGW but what the heck, let's just blame them anyway...

Not sure it is fair to generalise across the South West is fair. FGW/GWR's stewardship of Devon and Cornwall local services is generally accepted to have been a successful one, with traffic on the branches in particular and around Exeter well up on what it was 12 years ago.

And GWR certainly do intend to do something about the Sunday working situation and has been talking to Aslef about this and harmonising terms and conditions across the versions bits of the operation for some time now - the delayed start to driver training on IETs at Oxford was linked to some of these negotiations.

 

[father_jack]

And right on cue....

SUNDAY WORKING, GUARDS – GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY

Further to my Circular No IR/300/18 dated the 4th July 2018 with regards to the above matter and where I informed you of the meeting with our GWR Divisional Council Representatives, the Lead Officer and National Officers to discuss the union’s negotiating position regarding the issues raised in the resolution received from our Plymouth No 1 Branch.

I can now advise you that following conclusion of this meeting, the union’s National Executive Committee has again considered the matter and I have been instructed to negotiate a Sunday Working Agreement for all grades with Great Western Railway. Therefore, I am in the process of making the necessary arrangements for a meeting to be held and I will, of course, keep you fully advised on any further developments as and when the arise.

In accordance with the above, I would be most grateful if you could bring the content of this circular to the attention of your GWR Guard members.

Best wishes.

Mick Cash
General Secretary