Like I said, marketing spiel does not match on the ground reality. Maybe TfW press should keep quiet and rein in their advertising spend until said trains are actually reliably in service every day.
Progress is not linear, and when has marketing of any product or service ever matched reality?
Perhaps but it's somewhat frustrating when things are pretty dire on the ground that instead of any admission that there is a problem there's just a relentless stream of positive PR.
E.g. shutting down a line for 2 weeks at a few days notice with no explanation or apology, just a press release about how wonderful it is that they are doing electrification work.
The delay to the introduction to these units is because of the electrification - it should have gone live in November, and then was kicked back to February, and then we got very close to it and for some reason it was delayed again. It's likely to be to do with safety assessments for the interface between the wires and the surrounding buildings and structures, but we haven't had any formal confirmation of this yet. The Coryton service runs Coryton-Penarth-Caerphilly and return which is why Lisvane, Llanishen and Heath are mentioned in the press release.
Still no extended parapets on many of the bridges over the wires which are to go live. Maybe they're not needed somehow (though I can't think of anywhere else in the UK I've seen such low parapets over live wires).
It is so obvious that many of the armchairs critics in these boards have no idea how major projects like this work. One small bit of electrification infrastructure not working can set the project back weeks. Remember you are trying to upgrade a working railway. There are only so many opportunities you can have to carry out engineering works and these need to be planned weeks in advance. It may look amateurish to the lay person but it will happen as fast as it can. The only way to speed it up is close it all down and just work on it 24/7.
Well of course there have been times when they
have just shut everything down for an extended period. And, unlike the rest of the network, TfW don't appear to need to plan weeks in advance - they can just shut lines down at a few days notice if convenient for them.
TfW doesn't look hugely competent to this lay person. I appreciate that often there are good reasons that aren't apparent but when I see what looks like poor decision making over and over and over again it starts to feel as if maybe it is just poor decision making.
I would argue that just as an outsider might be wrong in thinking that things could be done better, it's just as much of a mistake to assert from the outside that everything must be being done in the best possible way and that there is no scope for improvement.
Coryton is difficult to replace with a bus as there is no convenient parallel road.
And of course they don't bother. Just use your ticket on Cardiff Bus (if they've bothered to actually arrange it) and if you wanted to travel between two intermediate stops then it's a rail replacement walk for you.
One other big missing piece is that there's supposed to be a big track and signalling upgrade at Queen Street which should be happening around now but doesn't appear to have been announced.
Which might just mean they don't know the exact dates and a major closure will suddenly (and quietly) appear on the service disruption pages at short notice.
Unfortunately this is just not good enough, TfW keep kicking the can down the road on new train introduction and finding excuses for their poor performance. This press release has only been put out because they've been shamed into it by 3 of the Coryton line stations being in the top ten of most cancelled services in the UK.
I'm intrigued by the suggestion that the 756s will improve punctuality by having more carriages and doors. Clearly when they're busy people will get on and off faster than a single 153. I'm not so sure they'll make much of a difference compared to 150s. And the minimum dwell time is considerably longer because of the time to extend and retract steps - which has to be done separately for the local door as well as the other doors (and unlike a 15x you even have to wait for the alarm to sound before the local door will shut).