Great Western Coffee Shop

By "full availability" I mean not a perfect service, but no worse than that provided before the present crisis.
No routine cancellations or short workings, with almost all trains full length when booked to be.
Commonsense to be applied in defining "full availability"
Redefining "normal service as being say half of the pre crisis level does NOT count.
Nor does redefining 5 car units from London as being "normal"

I respectfully urge keeping most comments in the main IET thread so as to keep the discussion in one place. News about cracks, repairs, consequences, and alternative rolling stock all belong in the existing thread.

Suggest limiting postings  in THIS THREAD to directly related matters.
E.G. "I believe that XX months would be reasonable because of YY"

Hmmm ... great minds thing alike.    We seem to have two similar polls.

See also http://www.passenger.chat/24987 which is asking about SERVICES returning to near normal rather than IETs specifically.

An update from the Bedwyn Trains team, who's service remains severely impacted ... this is part of a long report  to a public list looking at the issues arising from the current changes from plan at Kintbury, Hungerford and Bedwyn, and suggestions of how to tune them to make them work better for the customers.

It is now "mid June" and GWR IETs have NOT returned to full availability.

I appreciate that IET supporters may argue that "covid mode" IS the new normal and that a near normal service is being run by that definition.
I did however state in the O/P that "redefining a reduced service as being the new normal does not count"

Neither does deciding that half length trains are the new normal.

I am not aware of any timetable for repairs.
There must be some risk of the cracks worsening and of additional units being stopped as a result.

It’ll be many months- probably why only 10% voted for the ‘mid June’ option in your poll.  I didn’t vote as I considered your definitions too open to interpretation, and it almost felt as if it were designed so you could add later posts such as the one you just have.

What is clear is that availability is far better than you were expecting in your posts during the 11 day near stoppage of the fleet.  A ‘near normal’ service is running, based on the May timetable that was published before the cracks were known about.

There will continue to be good days and bad, and short formations will continue to happen, though in the majority of cases there are still not enough passengers travelling for that to be a problem on the majority of services affected.

You also have no clear idea of how many are out owing to the cracks problem & how many are out for other reasons (that would have happened in 'normal' running.....)

Can we have less whatif-ery - this is exactly that. Hitachi/GWR have no requirement to keep you up to speed with exactly the number of units out owing to this problem, so you are simply guessing

The present situation is clearly not a "return to full availability" which was the question asked in the poll.

It requires no detailed knowledge of the numbers stopped due to cracks, and the numbers stopped for either reasons, to state this.
Even if the numbers of short formations are due to faults other than cracks, that is still a very poor performance for new and expensive trains.

then


But doesn't gel with your first post.

Time has passed and the "between three months and six months" until a return to full availability is only days away and clearly not going to to be met.

Not aware of any timetable for repairs.

More time has passed, and the "between 6 months and a year" possibility has not been achieved.

We do now have a timetable for repairs, but it is a multi year program.

It is now beginning to look as if the last option of "never, alternative stock required" is going to be at least partly correct. The ORIGINAL idea of the IETs was that as routes were electrified, that all but one engine would be removed so as make them electric trains, with limited emergency "limp home" diesel power.

Yet elsewhere on these forums we read that 387s or similar EMUs could be used in place of IETs for Cardiff services and possibly also Oxford services when electrification reaches that place.

The bi-modes came into their own yesterday when a train load of scrap had some metal projecting above the wagons and caused the OLE to trip in the Severn Tunnel areas.  Several South Wales services were forced to switch to diesel power.  Luckily no 387s were in the area.

I am not sure that this statement is entirely correct and I can't remember any authoritative body making that claim at the time.

In order to supply more bi-modes to the Western the 'electric' versions of the IETs which were subject to the change order had to have a considerable number of modifications made to accept the diesel gen sets. For example wiring looms needed modification, the underbody areas needed modifications to allow exhaust systems to be fitted and so on.

It is indeed possible to convert a bi-mode IET to an electric version, but going the other way is only economically possible if the coach body is built as the bi-mode version in the factory. In view of the additional costs involved, throwing away the gen sets and all their associated gubbins to get electrics after a few years seems a very expensive way to go about it.

It was always intended that 387s would make up part of the Paddington service when the wires reached Oxford - they would operate the outer-suburban semi-fast and stopping services which now terminate at Didcot. The IETs would continue to operate the Cotswold line services as now. And there always was an intention to use 387s to Cardiff as crowd busters for events at the nearby stadium. So nothing new there.