Great Western Coffee Shop

I cannot see any published information on this, nor can see any amended timetables since May, but recently Gatwick/Redhill services have been leaving Reading 2 minutes earlier than before.

Maybe this is due to the leaf fall season or the TSR which has been West of Wanborough for some time.

Leaf fall, surely?

I hadn't noticed either, though I've not come back on a GWR service for a couple of weeks.

The printed timetable says:
"Travelling from 10 October?
Train services will be amended due to seasonal conditions. Please check carefully before travelling."

In other words "we've printed this timetable, but please don't believe it." In practice that means checking every train you want to use on line, just in case. And that's not easy, for everyone, or even not possible.

There's nowhere in their current web site to look for a general statement - there used to be, but now there's only specifically engineering works (as if a passenger cares why the timetable's now wrong). The timetable (once you locate it) is as printed, and the list of changes doesn't mention this route. And no posters.

It may be only two minutes, but it still looks like a plan to make people miss the trains. Unless they really are stupid enough to think that's enough of a warning?

That would seem to chime with when I saw the change.

From what I can work out the extra 2 minutes seems generally to be Mondays to Fridays in the down direction between Reading and Guildford then it runs as "normal" after that.

There is a poster at Reading, at the entrance to Platform 5. Where you are not likely to see it when you arrive off a train, nor if you are running for a train that's two minutes earlier than you expected.

There's no sign at Wokingham, though the platform timetable does show it and is valid from 9th October. Of course on this bit of the line SWT do their three minutes earlier ex Reading as a formal timetable change, with printed timetables available (and you can see their poster next to GWR's).

Yesterday (Friday) was a good one. The last Reading-Gatwick train was cancelled (pretty much all day), until about 2 hours before it was due to run. Then it was re-instated.

Isn't that one normally crewed by Southern staff (some of whom were on strike yesterday)?