The latest letter published by the RMT in April shows the they tried to make the IET trains to Oxford diagrammed DOO from the May timetable so it has clearly gone beyond merely floating proposals. There was also a letter to Kerry McCarthy MP in 2015 in which it is clear that this idea of 'exceptional circumstances' which again is impossible to define, meaning a IET runs DOO is not confined to Oxford.
What on earth are you on about? Do you not understand there is a DOO agreement in place for Paddington-Oxford and there has been since 1992-3 when the Turbos arrived?
In the case of this route and to Bedwyn, there is precisely nothing stopping DOO operation of Class 800s - BUT GWR has stated for a long time now that ALL Cotswold Line IET services will have a train manager on board east of Oxford, which was not always the case in the past on Turbos and still isn't at the moment. There is no agreement with the unions on what might happen in exceptional circumstances, or even what those might be, so no change in operations on other services.
I genuinely don't understand your fascination with Maidenhead. It has nothing to do with capacity in IETs. Reading passengers don't go via Staines in significant numbers and will do so even less with Crossrail, nor do they use stopping services. Commuters do not take the slightest notice of nonsense like a theoretical 10min interchange time at Paddington. If Maidenhead is 46min, Reading will be 56min which is almost exactly the same as today. Unless you are suggesting Reading commuters will physically move to Maidenhead it isn't material?
If your beef is about capacity in the Thames Valley, then any and every bit of new rolling stock operated by GWR or Crossrail and recent and forthcoming timetable changes are all relevant.
And if it's just about Reading, I'm afraid that no one is going to build the entire GWR long-distance operation around what might suit Reading commuters on a 20-minute journey twice a day - which would probably be 10-car IETs just shuttling up and down between Paddington and Reading, with all the lines further west shut down, so there would not be any other passengers to get in their way.
I have explained already I have no interest in a semantic debate about the meaning of words. Most of the Virgin Trains fleet is not divisible and within that fleet, they run with a high level of reliability with few cancellations. Therefore the flexibility to run half a train to avoid running no train at all is not required and is not a reason or excuse to use half length trains, which does happen.
No, you just prefer sweeping, inaccurate statements instead. Picking up on incorrect statements is nothing to do with semantics - it's called getting the facts right.
I never said that there were not occasions that a five-car IET had operated on GWR instead of a 2x5 - but you kept claiming that this is "routine" - for some reason you seem to have stopped now...
Yes - that is how most UK TOCs are scaled to operate. Having more off-peak seats doesn't take something away. I have explained the concept of 1x6/7 formations where they do not serve that market during the whole day. The capacity increment from 1x9/2x5 to 1x10 is a full 26m carriage so about 90 additional seats not 'perhaps four dozen' and so would be more than is being gained from HST to the current IET.
Clearly you are not interested in anything anyone else has to say about why 1x6 or 1x7 isn't some masterstroke that the people running GWR - and the rest of us - have missed.
Again what does capacity on suburban services have to do with IETs? This constant focus on irrelevant topics does not inspire confidence.
So we should instead be inspired by your insistence that running 1x10 monster trains all day, every day, everywhere on the GWR network is the only thing that matters? Do me a favour.
If extra capacity is provided on fast outer-suburban services - something that has simply not been possible with the rolling stock GWR had available until recently - then that can provide an attractive extra option for Reading commuters, thus freeing capacity on the long-distance trains.
And there is a big wide world out there west of Reading, where 1x10 trains would be utterly inappropriate much of the time - as would 1x9 or 8 or 7 or even 6 - hence why the GWR fleet includes 1x5 trains - which can also be coupled to make a big train for the peaks that actually fits into the platforms at Paddington.
You tell me? The railways are in a relentless state of crisis and chaos.
Some of us here are old enough to remember Operation Princess. Don't worry they said, they know what they are doing. They know how many people use their trains, there are more of them. They will get people to travel off peak and doubling their frequency. Guess what happened?
Why didn't VTEC realise they would go bust?
Why didn't NXEC realise they would go bust?
Why didn't Northern think there would be any growth in passenger numbers?
Why did TPE order those 3 car trains?
Why did NR build the Orsdall Curve without Platform 15/16.
You could go on for hours with the things the great luminaries running the railways missed that everyone else thought of and when I read all these statements about Staines and Maidenhead I see history repeating itself.
Besides 2 kitchens on a service to Bristol looks even more of a waste than it does on Euston - Birmingham with one kitchen. But unlike Great Western, West Coast have very little overcrowing in the peak.
I am plenty old enough to remember all about Operation Princess and to have seen it in action in all its horror at times - and it has nothing to tell us about IET operations on GWR - even the DfT was keen to avoid a Mk2 of that experience.
Why oh why...
Here's some more semantics for you. The 2004-16 Northern franchise was determined to be a 'no growth' one by the DfT, and offered to bidders on that basis - presumably in the face of widespread opinion to the contrary among local passengers, councils and probably the companies that put in bids as well.
You seem to be forgetting that GWR has 35 nine-car IETs on the way, so there won't be two kitchens on rather a lot of Bristol or Cardiff services. Trains which will have 630-odd seats, a good few of which will not see a single person's backside an on off-peak duty all day - never mind adding several dozen more seats in yet another coach.
Not the West Coast comparison again - look at the mix of services on the West Coast, which has meant the DfT never expected Virgin to handle most of the Milton Keynes commuter traffic. The mix of services that is now appearing in stages on the GWML will produce something much more akin to the service pattern on the WCML. Oh, and the West Coast TOCs got plenty of extra and new rolling stock over recent years - about all GWR got was some secondhand HSTs as it constantly tried to play catch-up.
Forgive me is there is precisely zero confidence in the ability of the railways to get anything right on its own, while being openly hostile to constructive criticism.
If only they had listened to you then....
