Are you sure? If you go to the booking office side of the station, the staff will take you across the track at the barrow crossing at the west end of the platforms. At least, they used to...

Does that mean situation downgraded from bedlam to mildly infuriating? 

Or, "bedlam" as it's also known.

I'm on the 17:15 Paddington - Swansea, just left Reading at 18:10. Buses from Didcot to Oxford and beyond.

Happy travels!

I do Chippenham to London once or twice a week. My poor wife did it as her daily commute for 18 months a few years back. It's no worse than any other journey to be honest. Right now I am on a Paddington - Swansea service which has 4 trains worth of people on it and I'm only going to get as far as Swindon where I will have to figure out how to do the rest of the journey. This is not unusual - I mean significant delays between London and the South West. It is also grievously expensive - my peak single ticket is ^64 tonight which is frankly outrageous. Enjoy!

I suspect as it is a lower voltage it requires more lineside equipment to keep the voltage up (greater losses over a shorter distance) so it is better suited to areas where there are a lot of stations already there. Also I would guess that it simply doesn't deliver as much "grunt" as overhead.

Haven't been on a train for a good six or eight weeks. Rocked up to Chippenham this morning to catch the 0725 to Paddington to find (a) APCOA^▸ (Car parking company used at GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) - controlled stations in the area) still haven't finished putting new parking machines in and (b) all hell breaking loose on the platform, with the poor sod in the information booth batting of insults and ranting from a plethora of disgruntled punters who, to be fair, just wanted to know if there was any chance of getting to London today but really weren't going about it in a clever way.

So eventually we got on the Swansea service which had started from Swindon and went back to Bath, then via Westbury and Newbury up to Reading. Eventually into Paddington just after 1000. No idea what happened - was stated as an "incident" at Swindon, whatever that is. Presumably MTU^▸ (Motor Traction Unit) scattering itself into oily bits all over the place or something.

Not at all, 90kph is quite legal on the motorway 

IIRC^▸ (if I recall/remember/read correctly) Chippenham should have lifts by 2012 or something. Epic levels of investment I think you'll agree 

Good grief, it's overcrowded, there aren't enough ticket sales options (despite the report finding "no queues" - presumably they visited at midnight?), there's nothing decent to eat or drink, virtually nowhere to sit, it's sat next to a derelict sorting office, it has an unused conveyor bridge spoiling the general atmos... I could go on! Paddington is a much more pleasant place, and that's coming from someone who prefers root canal work to going to London.

Paul challenged me on why I didn't take into account the cost of tax and insurance, and depreciation of the car. Here goes, then:

Interesting point, Paul

I'm not worried about tax or insurance, since I would need a car anyway and I would need to pay this regardless of whether I use it for work or not. And, of course, my figures for taking the train don't take into account this either (I would need to drive to the station) so I think it's a fair comparison.

As to depreciation - it is a 1998 BMW 5-series with 120,000 miles on the clock. Relatively speaking, it was worth nothing when I bought it, it's worth nothing now, and it will be worth nothing when it explodes and I buy another one. It's called Bangernomics. Oh and it still cruises silently at 90 on the M4 whilst I listen to Radio 4.

Oh, so it's not a kind of Honda then? 

Exactly. It should NOT be hard to program a system to never place a child reservation in A or G (quite who would pay first class fares for the kids is beyond me, but anyway...). If someone specifically wants to sit in there with kids, they should be free to do so on the proviso that the kids keep quiet. The people in A this morning were not there by choice.

As a semi-comical aside, one woman was moaning to her companion about said children on arrival to Paddington. I politely (ish) reminded her that they had clearly been given the seats as reservations so it wasn't really their fault. Of course, she might well have spotted this, had she not been blind 

Surely it is not beyond the wit of man, woman or even FGW^▸ (First Great Western) to realise that when you sell 2 adult and 2 child tickets to the same person, the quiet coach is not the place to seat them? Currently there are 2 separate families with noisy kids sat in the quiet coach. Clearly no-one (not even me!) would expect kids to keep quiet for 2 hours sat in a train - so why put them in the quiet coach?!?!?

Two questions, posed on another forum:

1.  Maximum speeds starting from Paddington through to Bristol go like this:

Paddington 40-50-125-95-50-125-85-125-100-75-40-90-100-25-Bristol Temple Meads

At what mileage points do the speeds change?


2. How can one get hold of the freight train schedules that use the line from Thingley Junction to Melksham and beyond?

Do me proud, chaps!