Great Western Coffee Shop

Subject says it all  ;D

Paddington 24/7, channel 5, 21:00 tonight

Tonight being 9th April 2018

Watched last week's edition, it doesn't portray GWR very favourably. I'll catch up on last night's sometime this week no doubt!

I've really enjoyed them so far.

It IS interesting to see how they handle things when it falls apart, and to a point I can have more sympathy*, but equally I hope they also take on board the feedback that is aired in the show - last night was a prime example, things fell apart, they started trying to "fix" the timetable and as a result the local stoppers were running fast and, in this instance, West Drayton was not being served, which according to one lady happens every time.

I know the same happens with Tilehurst-Cholsey stops when they are trying to make up time and run non-stop from Reading to Didcot, and it annoys the hell out of me as well. Their responsibility should be getting delayed customers to their destinations, not trying to get the time table back into shape (which they will claim is for the good of the customer, but we all know in reality it is to avoid paying out compensation for the rest of the day/night!).


* and I refer to unforeseen issues, not lack of planning due to staff, repairs, and all the usual issues.

A phrase about polishing/covering in glitter springs to mind...

One bit that I did not understand in last nights programme was the failed EMU being eventually rescued by another similar unit.
It was stated that after coupling together the dead unit and the assisting unit, that everyone had to walk through the gangway from the dead unit into the assisting one.
Why ? What prohibited the passengers from remaining in the failed unit until it arrived at Paddington ?
If the limitation was a short platform at Paddington, then delay could have been reduced by having passengers walk through whilst the train was en-route.

It looked poor planning to let passengers at Paddington board the unit that was to assist, and then have to kick them all off.

One thing I find odd, is that the program is called "Paddington 24/7" but so much of the show is about other parts of the GWR network. I wonder why the name wasn't chosen to reflect this?

Haven't seen last nights episode yet, but the first two episodes were obviously filmed quite recently - do the film makers need "something to happen" to fill future episodes? or I wonder if they have enough material already?

The cameras have been around Temple Meads for weeks, so should have plenty of footage?

Maybe the way forward is like other "reality shows" in that events are "staged"

I think they have front-end loaded this series to have recent and more high profile events up first. Seems to be working from an audience perspective as it has an audience of about 1.5M.

In the last episode one of the station managers had an enamel poppy on just above his name tag, but as he is ex-forces maybe it's a permanent fixture, who knows.

Edit: (so that part may have been around November)

Maybe all the issues with the availability of trains and drivers for GWR isn't down to incompetence or bad planing but are being 'staged' so that there is enough material for this TV series. Obviously the lack of any apology for these issues from GWR is because they didn't want to spoil the plot before each episode has aired.  :)
It all makes sense now. :)

Do you know what caused the unit to need to be rescued?  There’s several scenarios where passengers would not be able to travel in a train that can’t continue in service on its own.  They include no interior lights (at night), defective doors, broken windows or equipment being isolated due to a fault such as the fire alarm system, the interlock system, broken windows etc.

Having corridor connections makes the transfer of passengers an awful lot easier if the failed train isn’t at a station.

The organisation around that rescue did seem a little chaotic to say the least - "you're joking me" being overheard in the control room when someone happened to mention that the "rescue" train was already full and standing with passengers!

Was good to see some coverage (from the cab) of the recent PAD-RDG record attempt. Considering that linespeeds for the first 3-4 miles out of PAD are a lot slower than when the record was set, they got pretty close.
At one point the driver mentioned that he had to "coast" (and lost 6mph as a result) near Maidenhead - anyone know the reason for that?

Section break, presumably?

He said it was a neutral section, but I thought there weren't any neutral sections West of Hayes maybe Electric Train can help.

Maidenhead has an MPATS, so it has to function as a section break. It doesn't matter if the power is being passed through the MPATS, connecting the wires on both sides together, neutral section is still there.

I sat under the pantograph of a 387 on 1P20, the 7:30am 'commuterbuster' from Didcot to Padd some weeks ago and can vouch that the only neutral section between Didcot and Padd is at the Maidenhead MPATS, just west of the station. You don't miss the VCBs opening and closing on the 387s, there's quite a bang!

So, to the layman, what's a "neutral section" and an "MPATS"?

It's a section of overhead line without any power as the overhead line either side of it isn't fed by the same substation.

There should eventually be one at Reading, or rather one on the main line plus similar breaks to isolate the B&H. But it's possible it isn't actually there yet.

We did get to see Mark Hopwood at Paddington.

Perhaps MPATS and VCB could be added to the Acronyms/Abbreviations section?

Shame he can't get there for a "Meet the Manager" session.

It's interesting to see that the series is not focusing on the Cotswold line. I don't think they've mentioned it once. Now this might be because there were precious few trains running at the time up towards Hereford/Worcester/Great Malvern. Or they only had limited cameras and none of them were close to Oxford and beyond. Could have covered it at Paddington I suppose. Either way it isn't being shown which is a shame as it might have shown up the shocking service.

And that’s why they don’t show it. This is a fly on the wall documentary but it is Pravda-esque in its support of GWR where the effects upon passengers of disastrous service failures are limited to occasional glimpses of ‘unreasonable’ grumpy passengers. 
If GWR paid 1% of the attention they spent on getting me home in semi-comfort each night as they paid to fawning after 25 members of the Thai royal family I’d be a happy man. But they don’t. And I’m not.

It would have been interesting had HRH wished to go to Hereford or Great Malvern!

Yeah sorry I was being slightly tongue in cheek with my post. GWR are unlikely to go for another series if they don't like what they are seeing on screen. So a massive bunch of delays and cancellations along with the odd two car turbo replacing an 8 car HST is hardly going to be compulsive viewing for the top brass.

You need to get the timetable back in shape as quickly as possible.  If you don't, the chances are the services operated by that train for the rest of the day will all be late and the delays will probably increase as the services will have lost their paths.  Then you've got knock on delays to other services, missed connections, major crew displacement and the train returning to the depot late in the evening which means it loses its slot in the maintenance shed which means it could be a late start off the depot in the morning and the first service it operates will be obviously be delayed and it starts all over again. 

Both terms have indeed now been added to that Coffee Shop forum page, at http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/acronyms.html  ;)

I think the problem is that more emphasis os put on running a punctual railway rather than a relabel railway.

I discussed this with a long serving GW manager who stated you can only run a punctual railway of it's reliable. Trains should constantly run around near there booked time.

I believe the 8 coach unit failed as the panto graph got shredded. So in order to get the passengers into Paddington, they attached another 387, brought the passengers into the replace, and moved the entire 16 coach train into Paddington.  (As the failed unit would not be platformed)  This stopped people pushing through into the replacement once at Paddington.  The unit was then taken back to Reading for repairs.   Of course if OOC was open, a Class 57 could have come, and shunted the failed unit into Padd, and dragged it to the depot for repairs within 30 or 40 mins, instead of Route Control, leaving it at Royal Oak for 2 hours.


I found the bit about the Thai princess quite laughable, When shes paying a lot of £££ for an entire coach, id expect the train to turn up on time, or at least GWR to swap to a train that is already in Paddington to ensure things go smoothly. They also mucked up that time with Prince Harry & Meghan, so not good.

Maybe - but why should her money offer her additional privelages to those of us that pay thousands a year?

Also thought that it was interesting that the competition that they are running during the commercials was a ticket from London to Looe

What about anyone that doesn't live in the London area?

Let's be honest, every business rolls out the red carpet under these circumstances, it's just that the GWR carpet is more worn out, stained and frayed than most!

The series title is Londoncentric in presentation, though lots of footage from elsewhere ... I would take an educated guess that the prize will allow you to travel on any GWR service (starting at any station they serve) to Looe.

I think the prize includes First Class Anytime Return tickets.

If so, or indeed if they are First Class Off Peak Returns, then the prize winners can start and end their journey at any intermediate station between Paddington and Looe.

That should include Bristol, might include Melksham (special stop during a B&H blockade) and would not include Swansea.

Yes, Melksham is on a permitted routed from Paddington to Looe. No need for a special stop. Start at Melksham and change at either Chippenham or Westbury for onward travel via either Bristol or Taunton.

Obviously Swansea is way off a permitted route but then there is £500 spending money included in the prize. That'll get you to say Reading to pick up a GWR train to Liskeard for Looe.  ;)

The prize could actually include GWR First Class Anytime Return scratchcard tickets. If they haven't been pre filled in with Paddington as the origin station they could be used from any station on the GWR network. Customers validates these tickets themselves, writing in the origin and destination and scratching off the date of travel. These tickets then have the same terms as an Anytime Return (start/end short, break journey) except that they are only valid on GWR services.

It's not going to be any skin off GWR's nose for the winners to travel from any GWR station - rumoured to be plenty of seats all around their first class network most of the time, even when standard is full, and it's unlikely that the winners will want to travel at peak times which I suspect would mean a very late arrival into Looe / a very early departure indeed from there.

These competitions are money making exercises, I think. Prizes may look wonderful, but when you look at how much people each pay in via the premium rate line's extra charge, and then multiply it by the number of entries, it starts to look like a form of lottery or gambling with poor odds.


Requests for special stops on even one or two days during the 50 days of service decimation this year have been turned down - big pity as it would have been an excellent marketing opportunity for day trips to Paignton or London.   But seeing as it's proving impossible to even deliver seven calls a day against the normal 18, I have to admit that it's probably a wise decision; a platform with 100 people on it, work underway (by then) to extend it to be long enough for the usual train, and the risk of a service that fails to operate near to time ...

It's text message entry, not a premium rate phone call. I'd argue that £2 plus one standard rate message (10-15p) isn't excessive. Yes, these competitions easily generate more revenue than the prize cost, but the odds of winning are an order of magnitude less than a major lottery win.

Oh, and you can enter for as little as 56p if you chose to do so by post.

Royal Mail First & Second Class went up 2p a month ago BTW :)

Doesn't really matter if you've got a book of NVI (Non-Value Indicator) stamps I suppose.

I've got various small denominations of stamps for when I occasionally send letters abroad or if I want to make the front of an envelope colourful.

(usually combined with larger value ones to get the exact price)

If they really had booked an entire first class coach, then at least they should be provided with that. So the train with the full first class coach locked out of use would be unsuitable.

And they were almost certainly paying a LOT more per mile than season ticket holders who pay heavily discounted fares for peak time travel.

I noticed they were in coach K which is a composite coach of half standard half first.

In reference to the London/Paddington centric nature I was wondering if "other place" 24/7 may be an option for future series.

One of the reasons being if you see the A4 notices referring to filming at Reading station it says for Reading 24/7. My assumption was this is a working title for the shooting done there which then becomes part of the Paddington 24/7 programme.

Do you think when they were planning the series they had a conversation along the lines of "..I wonder if there will be enough incidents to fill a couple of programmes?"

Well they decided on 20 programs so were obviously confident of enough things taking place though I have to say they really ham things up at times for the smallest of incidents. I just remind myself that this is a general entertainment program aimed at appealing to the casual veiewr so don’t take it too seriously.

I would think that in today's GWR land they would have enough material to fill and episode EVERY DAY.

There must be times when GWR and Network Rail wish there wasn’t a camera crew waiting for something to kick off.

Hmmm... I wonder... Could the current problems on GWR be the result of a Channel 5 sabotage team trying to spice up their footage?

Disclaimer - I haven't actually watched this programme yet. Is it any good?

From the couple of episodes I have watched, like all such TV programmes, it revels in turning a minor issue into a major crisis (not that NR/GWR need much help in doing that anyway)..... ::) :D

Just watched the most recent episode (21/05/2018).

Paddington Duty Station Manager Tom Law will go far with GWR. His attitude to customers, his way of speaking to them, fits in perfectly with the current contempt GWR's higher management treat those who dare to spend money travelling with GWR.

Such a contrast to the helpful and empathetic attitude shown by the Customer Assistants/Ambassadors.

Agree. Classic example of small man syndrome. Given a little authority and perhaps a hat & a whistle they all become Giants.

21:00 again, Channel 5, this evening, 28/05/18, royal wedding at Paddington/Windsor (H&M) etc.

OTC

They did very well on getting people to Windsor but the rest of the programme just seemed to be lurching from one chaotic situation to the next.

Thelack of effective communication which we are all so familiar with as customers is a theme running through the whole series.

We generally continue to do pretty well at dealing with large planned events (Henley, Glastonbury, Reading Festival, London 2012, major engineering possessions) with only a few cock-ups (Rugby World Cup), but completely fall to pieces when dealing with unplanned events.  Those ones are obviously more difficult to deal with, but we could do a hell of a lot better.

The problem is the programmes timeline is all skewed, it makes out that the 387 ran into the OLE dead section at Didcot and the trespassers in Bristol were at the same time as the Royal wedding

My grandson wants to work on the railway and would really enjoy this show, but unfortunately the uncensored swear words and unnecessary pictures of half of a dead rat makes it a bit out of his age range! Here's hoping for a family suitable cut they could show earlier in the day.

Is there going to be another series next year?.

The feeling is that it's become a bit "same old same old" and I believe there are plans for it to be replaced by Melksham 24/7 - Graham can you confirm this?  :)

That aired a few years ago  ;)

https://g.co/kgs/m8kVgB

Funnily enough  ;D ;D .. I was ealier writing about the need to take a break from things - under the daily campaigning tip that I launched this morning at http://www.passenger.chat/better/campaigning.html .  That particular tip is scheduled to go live around next weekend.

I was convinced that link was going to take me here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBt_l5eG53A (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBt_l5eG53A)  ;D

Diane Abbott has put in a bid for her local station too - Hackney Central 25/8.

New series starts next Monday. Channel 5 21.00

This could be an interesting series. I guess it all depends how much footage they got pre pandemic. A bit like the recent Ritz hotel documentary there won?t be a huge amount of interesting stories post March to record.

Interesting that some of the stories seemed more up to date

I noticed that they didn't blur the date clock at the Swindon office in this episode (showed 31st July)
Also the QPR match was September 5th 2020

Just watched it. As interesting as ever, though I wonder how the TV team(s) seem to be on hand for so many incidents. Also nostalgic, as I haven't been to Paddington since November. I was a little surprised to see it was quite busy.

I've only just got around to watching the first episode but I was surprised as well by how many people were travelling. The hot weather incident seemed to be end of July and I guess that was the point the government was telling us all to go back to work.

I did find that now I'm not travelling I was able to enjoy it much more as 'television' rather than worrying about my commute, timelines or even how the incidents were presented.

Much less shouting at the screen according to my other half.