Great Western Coffee Shop

I took my old parents to Bath spa to go home on 27th December. I knew it would be busy, but so did FGW. There were various  local cancellations and the Brighton train was 2 coaches. Had they had reason to get that, they would not have coped with the crush. Fortunately they were booked on an Inter City which increasingly seems to be the only trains FGW put a serious effort into keeping running.
I am aware there have been a huge number of cancellations due to staff shrtage. Has anyone out there come up with figures that indicate what proportion of trains have been cancelled  or teminated early in the last week?

If you are travelling to Brighton and are travelling light, the best way is to go via London though it will cost you a little more.

As for cancellations this past week (I include services which either terminated short of destination or started at a station further along the route when I say cancellations) there were quite a few, though I would excerise a bit of caution on being too critical because of the time of year with traincrew preferring to spend Christmas with their families rather than bail out FGW yet again with doing overtime.

What I would say though is that even with a reduced Saturday service in operation this past week that it has been disapointing to see the number of services that were cancelled.

This would not have given a positive customer experience for those who don't use travel by rail much and decided to let the train take the strain over the festive period and found that it wasnt running.

The majority of First Great Western's business and profit is in the InterCity trains - regulated fares are higher on them (in pence per mile terms) than on the "West" services, and they travel faster too so the miles clock up quicker.  Then you have the issue that you require more staff per seat on the shorter "West" services than you do on the InterCity-s so once again the business model is biased towards them; highly profitable, and the first place to put serious effort if you're loosing income because of problems.

I don't know what proportion of trains are cancelled over the current period - I do know that it was pre-planned to bustitute the TransWilts (so the services on that line will not show up in the stats as cancelled, even though they were!) with it being almost impossible to find out just what was running when.

Does anyone know how cancelled trains are calculated in the performance figures. For example, if a Cardiff to Taunton train is cancelled from Bristol to Taunton but runs the first leg, is that a cancellation or not? Or are they treated as two completely separate legs. How these figures are derived will make a big difference to the results, as an awful lot of services are being cancelled for part of the journey only.

grahame attempted to address similiar issues in the link below.
http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/melkshamrailway/138_Lies_damned_lies_and_statistics.html

I'm also running a current monitor for a short period at http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/running.php (http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/running.php) on which I quote some figures for the number of services scheduled over FGW as a whole.

Gosh, I barely ask the question and there is a monitoring process put in place, with more stats than I ever envisaged. When next I've got a vacancy in my team I'll know who to ask.

This looks very good stuff, and will I believe highlight the complete shambles that we currently have for a service.