Great Western Coffee Shop

This post / these picture to back up a newsletter I am working on

We hear about bus service cuts and overcrowded trains, but across the South West there are good news transport stories too.

New express trains have stadted to arrive on services from London to Bristol and South Wales, and starting in July they'll begin to take over services from London to Devon and Cornwall too.  By January 2019, most of our "High Speed Trains" will have moved on - some to Scotland and some to re-inforce services in Cornwall, where the first four carriage HST has already started to run on the notorious 06:00 from Penzance.  The new IET trains from London, and the short HSTs (called the Castle Class) in the South West will all accelerate more rapidly than the HSTs, and they'll have automatic doors too which will cut down station time and allow services to be speeded up without having to raise the line speed through expensive engineering. See http://twcrp.info/t18792


Looking for a modal change, First Bus have registered half hourly services to run from Bath to Melksham, Bath to Frome and Bath to Warminster as from the end of April. Services on Sunday and in the evening will run every 2 hours. Community groups and First Bus will be working together under a new series of route numbers (D1 through D3) to help make this a roaring success.  With gridlock in Bath, using the bus from Wiltshire and Mendip makes huge sense. See http://twcrp.info/t19537


Network Rail and its subcontractors are widening the railway from Bristol Temple Meads to Filton from 2 to 4 tracks.  This will allow extra trains to run to the North Bristol Area and Cardiff, and to Clifton Down and Severn Beach.  It will also allow extra departures from Bristol Temple Meads via Bristol Parkway to London, and allow express trains in and out of Bristol a clearer path keeping local stopper trains on their separate tracks.  See http://twcrp.info/t13113

Thank you, grahame - we do sometimes lose sight of the positives. My hope is that there are sufficient staff to make all of this a success, along with more trains than usual not needing repairs at the same time!

Thank you for the positives, but everyday we feel the negatives of late, cancelled and short trains, with compounded issues of silly decisions with signals holding an on-time train 12 minutes so a 9 minute late-train can get the station ahead of yours.

Unfortunately, that is a by-product of the new automatic signalling.