Great Western Coffee Shop

Saw a poster recently extolling the advantages of the new GWR electrics between Hayes & Harlington and Paddington. And I saw one of these trains at Hayes on Friday evening - it was largely empty.

The poster proudly proclaimed that the overcrowding between Hayes and London will now be eased with the introduction of this intensive new service. Er - intensive? Well with a mere four trains a day in each direction - that's two trains in the early morning, and two trains in the evening.

The empty train I saw came in on platform 3. After the pax. had detrained, it went west, crossed over to up relief and then the up loop out of the Airport, and waited, and waited, and waited, effectively blocking any Connect coming out of the Airport. Why didn't it use platform 5? And more to the point why aren't there more services than 4 a day?

I think you must of missed this thread: http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=14927.msg165630#msg165630

Yes, an all day service from January, additional peak services from Maidenhead from next May, and likely introduction of all-day service between London and Didcot from the end of next year.  Drivers are currently being trained to ensure there's enough that have signed them in time for January.

Platform 5 is not yet authorised for use by the 8-car Class 387s, but should be after work this Xmas is completed, so the all-day service will be using it.

The airport line is currently used to turn them around, but it doesn't effectively block the Connect trains which can quite easily get to the platform using another route.  The advantages of the very flexible layout that's being installed there.

Regarding the business of the trains, I bet it was far from largely empty when it left Paddington.  More and more people are choosing the new trains, which seem to be going down very well with commuters, taking a little pressure off of the previously bursting-at-the-seams Turbo services.  I watched the 17:18 depart Paddington a week or so ago and reckon it was about 75% full (with a few standees at the far end) - no doubt getting busier at Ealing Broadway, despite only leaving three minutes after the 17:15 Turbo.

Given it was terminating at Hayes, you'd hardly expect it to be full. It could have carried large numbers of passengers out of Paddington bound for the stops before Hayes.   You wouldn't have seen those.  Once the Greenford service is cut back to West Ealing all day from December the service will indeed run all day and will utilise the Greenford services' paths into Paddington.  Infrastructure changes being carried out over Xmas will remove the need for the rather convoluted reversal currently required, and I think will also enable Platform 5 to be used. Finally, and this is pure speculation, I'm presuming that the service was introduced before too many drivers had been trained on the units, but it was felt better to get a limited service up and running in peak hours, when the capacity is needed.

It seems sensible for the new electric services to build up as infrastructure becomes available - growing from seeds - and so the initial shoots may be tiny.  The alternative of waiting for the wires to be live all the way, and switching overnight from an intensive diesel service to an intensive electric service would be a recipe for potential disaster, with teething problems (if there were any) making what's been going on with Southern's service look trivial and genteel. I'm not saying that would happen - but there would be a significant risk of it.   The new Borders Railway had months of trial running of various sorts before it went live with a "big bang", but they had the luxury of no existing customer base to be conveyed during the trials, and the model doesn't work for a line that's already intensively used.

Thames Valley services are already intensive (I would LOVE to see even a sixth of the local train departure rate from Paddington on our line!) and will remain so, with higher capacity bedding in.    Growth takes time;  it's no accident that the DfT looks at a three year period for trials before they become a part of a main franchise - so this is acknowledged even at the centre where you might expect harder hearts (I wish the bus operators and support systems would take note of this timing!).

I've done a lot of work looking at seat occupancy rates ... not sure what it is up the Thames Valley, but a remarkably low-sounding  figure like 25% is actually rather good.   Passengers feel that all trains are busy when they're not; there are far more people around to see the busy trains - so they're typically the ones to be reported, and observing a train at the 'other end' of its run - even in the peak - is very informative and thought provoking with regard to peak cost provision, and to looking and seeing where further marketing / promotion can usefully be done.  Our TransWilts campaign this summer / wary autumn has concentrated on getting that seat occupancy rate up on our line, and that's done by promoting those services and parts of services where seats remain in plentiful supply.

In an interesting comparison to the 17:15 and 17:18 trains referenced in my post above, there's also the 17:12 to Henley-On-Thames which is a 5-car Turbo and usually loads to about 75% full (i.e. 25% of seats empty), which is not too far off the ideal balance between a train that's too empty and one which is uncomfortably full.  It runs first stop Slough, then Burnham, Taplow, Maidenhead, and Twyford before heading onto the branch.  However, because it usually departs from Platform 14, I've noticed a couple of times that the front carriage only has a couple of dozen people on board and consequently plenty of room, whereas the back two carriages are full to capacity with people standing. 

The journey time to Slough is a quite slow 22 minutes on the relief lines, so that somewhat spoils the attraction of it to the Maidenhead contingent.  That compares with the 17:18 to Oxford which is always a packed solid 5-car Class 180 first stop Maidenhead.

In terms of the January Hayes to Paddington all day shuttle, GWR proposes to run 6 morning Peak and 26 Off Peak trains from Hayes & Harlington to London Paddington and 6 evening Peak trains and 26 Off Peak trains from London Paddington to Hayes & Harlington.

It isn't just infrastructure readiness, they only received the last two of the initial eight unit batch last week.

What we are seeing is a perfectly normal phased introduction, changing all those relevant drivers from DMUs to EMUs takes time, it cannot be a big bang.

Might have been an idea for the OP to have had a browse of the forum for the existing threads first, rather than going straight into rant mode, although an initial rant and then disappearing for a few months is the usual routine...

Paul