Great Western Coffee Shop

Late notice engineering work taking place between Reading and London:

https://www.gwr.com/26march

Oh whoopee, I'm booked on the 0907 ex-Cardiff.....

Thanks for this info - I wouldn't have checked this far out, having already booked an Advance, one assumes that the train is running.

Great - sharing trains to Wembley with England supporters. Wish they'd ban alcohol on these morning trains when football is on.

The complication on Sunday is that there are no trains from Reading via Wokingham to anywhere - not Waterloo, nor Guildford. Hence the unusual advice to take a bus to Heathrow for a train to London, if you can't go via Oxford.

Oh, can go via Oxford (although NRE suggest going via Basingstoke with a bus to Woking & onwards to Waterloo), but I rather object to travelling with leery football supporters on a Sunday morning, when you want (& usually do get) peace & quiet to read the Sunday papers....

I heard a rumour about this over a week ago, why on earth have they left it so late in the day to announce it?

An improvement I am going to suggest to GWR is that they know who have booked affected trains, so why not email them & let them know? Quite easily done, I would have thought.

My guess is that they (and that might be GWR or NR or the two of them playing planning ping-pong) looked at the lack of alternative routes and thought they should try to do it another weekend if at all possible. So they thought very hard, and for so long that they simultaneously ran out of (1) ideas and (2) time and had to do it anyway, but by now with almost no notice.

Let's hope it doesn't overrun* before the Sunday afternoon/evening rush back to London as I don't think Chiltern's Oxford-Marylebone service would cope with the volume of passengers coming from Bristol/South Wales.

*Sadly Network Rail have form on overrunning  :(

No probs. First I heard about it was when it appeared on my Twitter feed this morning.

It's for the electrification switch on and testing, isn't it?

If that's the case then surely notification of a change to services on Sunday morning would have been communicated much sooner?

It was postponed from early this month, so I'm guessing this alternative date was rather hastily decided upon.  Needs to happen in next couple of weeks so testing and training of 387s can commence before passenger services start in May.

Damn, blast and curse.  I have a advance ticket for what was the 08:00 from Paddington to Taunton on Sunday which is now the 07:30 bus from Paddington according to the timetable. Think I might catch a later bus/train making sure I have a screen-shot of the web-page that says tickets will be valid for trains later in the day in case I get grief.

More worryingly, I only found out about the Sunday fun because I came on here after I heard about the derailment at East Somerset Junction.

Presumably (I hope!) there will  be announcements made and big signs at Taunton and Paddington about the Sunday Paddington - Reading closure on the way up to Paddington on Friday.

More cursing, muttering and grumbling.

Slightly tongue in cheek - but for those who enjoy such things - as a result of this there are through trains between Swindon and Oxford via the West Curve at Didcot on Sunday.

Suggestion elsewhere is that the closure is to address the ongoing reliability problems with the infrastructure in the area.

Not impossible, but would need cross industry co-operation to be completely effective as not everyone books a ticket for a GWR train on the GWR website.  Also if someone has booked via say the Virgin website and has ticked the opt-out box could the address even be passed on under data protection laws?

"Ere we go Ere we go Ere we go" (by bus)  :(

And no contact details would be available for anybody who booked in person at a ticket office.

But for those who do, it would be still better than now - and a bonus to push booking on the TOCs own website?

Indeed, the more people that can be reached the better.

Now, i like curves, but West curve doesn't really cut it.

Email from Mark Hopwood states "This will allow Network Rail to complete a key piece of work for the electrification of the Great Western mainline"

I did get an email last night that mentioned the works. They seem to send a 'journey reminder' 24 hours before your booking now.

Journey was long but it worked. Hopefully it won't over run beyond 1330 as Chiltern will get seriously overrun by football suporters anyway, and they don't want/need extras this afternoon

I was at Oxford at this morning and there was a sense of the lull before the storm.  Almost more staff than passengers.

Same on the train, my ticket was checked before we even left the station.

The first scheduled departures and arrivals are on track, so seems to have been handed back on time.