Great Western Coffee Shop

A letter from Mark Hopwood to the Cotswold Line Promotion Group has recently been published on their website with agreement from Mark Hopwood with regards to the recent service problems.

Although it talks about the issue from a North Cotswold perspective, it also has a very great deal of relevance all the way to Brighton and Penzance:

http://www.clpg.org.uk/blog/cotswold-line-service-problems-a-response-from-gwr/

I found the link to the letter on UK Rail Forums where the shortage of rail crew on the GWR rail network is also being discussed.

"jam tomorrow" but at least the letter gives some interesting and relevant details as to how this jam is to be provided.

I suspect that the letter might be the first official admission that reliability and availability of the new DMUs has fallen below that expected. I was beginning to think that only a few old dinosaurs like me had doubts, and that officially all was going splendidly.

There, Mark, a full and frank letter describing the problems and outlining what you are doing to resolve them.  You see you can do it!

I still think the contents of the letter should have been made public across the whole of GWR and not just confined to a Cotswold Group

Yes, but have you actually read it properly.  Focus will be on Cotswold services, and stuff everywhere else..... ::) :P

Have any other groups had similar letters? Are they also going to get a focus?

This should be addressed to every GWR customer, addressing the issues faced across the entire GWR network.
Front and centre on the GWR website, on social media channels and YouTube.

It's not good enough to be only seen to respond to those who have an easier route to contact with the MD. Even then, the first thing Mr Hopwood is doing is apologising for his own tardy response. If he can't get a handle on his own correspondence what chance him being able to get GWR back on track?

The buck stops with him. He needs to be seriously considering his position.

Well I guess it’s been written to cater for those with whom it was written to. If it was being written to those in South Wales it would be differently worded. In my view behind the North Cotswold line its South Wales that has suffered the most from cancellations and running short due to train crew issues of late.

I think what is lacking in Mark Hopwood’s letter is some recognition and appreciation of the efforts being made by GWR staff to keep the show on the road on a daily basis, despite the failings of the senior management team to fully anticipate and deal with the impact of training on 387’s and IET’s on traincrew availability to run the service.  This issue didn’t suddenly appear – it could be seen coming many months if not years in advance.

I think the phrase “getting drivers to work rest days for training” may be indicative of a lack of respect for drivers and may reflect the culture at GWR.  Other “old hands” have commented on the culture at Swindon: watching your back, stress, aversion to risk, looking forward to retirement etc.

As I’ve said before, in a service organisation you need to take your staff with you.  Valuing and respecting them is just a start.  In my long railway career the best example of this was at Thames and Chiltern under Dick Fearn.  How often did T&C cancel a train for lack of traincrew?  Hardly ever.  If it looked like a turn was going to be uncovered a quick phone call between a local manager and a driver (who knew each other) would fix it.  More effective than impersonal texts.

Now I’ll just wait for a response from someone saying that working for GWR and at Swindon in particular is a really pleasant and fulfilling experience…..

Not going to happen, I fear.

You can't train staff months in advance before working. They'd need at least refresher training is nce the stock arrived. Which could be problematical if training hadn't completed at the point the trains were made available. Also you can't start training until you have stock to train them on!

Thought you knewcbetter than that GtBE

Being fair, in aviation you are often called work work your rest days or sent abroad for emergencies, as far as the management is concerned your getting paid for it, so whats your problem.  These days like everything you don't get a break and a chance to enjoy your own life, its either work or nothing.

As for Mark Hopwood, I would rather he focused on fixing the holes that GWR and NR have dug, than dealing with passengers who often complain for the sake of complaining.

Says someone who hasn't had to experience the awful service, obviously

I applaud the letter as it admits from the top to a public audience that there are know issues and they are getting attention, all be it no instant solutions.  And I appreciate the trepidations with with writing such a letter in that whatever is said, it's not going to be good enough for some - indeed there will be some who admit to seeing zero merit in it and others who suggest that concentration should be on fixing the issues and not on explaining them and apologising for them.

However, two cheers out of three as far as I'm concerned.   Acknowledegment of the issues and that something should be done is huge.  So is an apology admitting that whilst things go wrong, the current situation has really taken the biscuit.   The cheer that's missing start from a concern that the Cotswold line is to be prioritised in a letter to the CLPG, and a wondering if the same thing is being said to everyone (which cannot be true) or if the eye is indeed going to be less on the ball on other services;   I fear this latter's the case with several station manager roles removed in the Bath / Bristol area, and yet more station management promised on the north cotswolds.

A good step.   A pity the meeting to which it refers is members only.   I wonder if anyone's considered joining for £6 so they can go along?  But reading here, I know we have a number of members who are Cotswold line members, and I would encourage them to file a brief and pertinent report.

A good step.  But not the whole journey.  A journey does, though, start with a single step.

BNM nails it for me.

It's a small gesture to a very small audience which even then is preceded with an apology for the late response!

This should be addressed to every GWR customer and distributed across all platforms and channels network-wide to maximise coverage - perhaps in the same way as the "Famous Five" campaign? And this should have happened some time ago

If this is the "single step" at the start of the journey then heaven help GWR, and more importantly its customers.

The problem is that this has taken so long to happen and has been executed in such a limited way that the initial response is bound to be cynicism and dissatisfaction - had Hopwood taken the bull by the horns some months ago when these problems were first a widespread issue, and arranged effective comms and frequent updates, it would be received more positively - it shouldn't be beyond someone with an MD's remit to have put this in place.

....mmm.  I did think last night that a certain Cotswolds MP had a word in the ear of a certain Maidenhead MP, who then had a word in the ear of a certain Epsom and Ewell MP, who then had a word in the ear of the DfT who then had a word with MH......That would take a couple of weeks...... ::) :P

Grahame, I do agree with some of the things you have said in your earlier post and yes, as they say "from small acorns do large trees grow" but......GWR as an organisation seems to have lost touch with its customers, but not entirely due to its own fault.  Performance from NR has been dreadful, and we seem to be suffering from major infrastructure failures on a daily basis (the total failure of the signalling at Swindon yesterday being the latest example).  In the past, and yes I do know we shouldn't always live in the past, if this number of repeat infrastructure failures had been encountered then senior heads would have rolled.  Trouble is, NR got rid of all its people with the necessary experience to manage such issues and I strongly believe we are now seeing the results of that.  Remember that modern signalling systems are designed for what we call 'Graceful Degredation' where during a failure only parts of the system should fail, and not the whole system, so I am at a loss as to how a whole signalling system can fail like it did yesterday.

So I do agree with some of your post, but not all.  There are certainly a large number of issues that are within GWRs remit to manage.

I'll go and have a lie down now..... ::) :P

I can happily say that this is incorrect. No MPs were involved to our knowledge. A certain President might have though :-)
The CLPG has excellent relations with GWR and that helps too.

Mark Hopwood generally does attend CLPG AGMs - I think he's probably been to more than he's missed.

Don't forget too that John Ellis, Chairman of the CLPG, is a very senior retired railwayman - GM of the Southern Region and MD of Scotrail.

...I would like to add to my earlier post that I do have a certain amount of sympathy with GWR, and in particular its front line, customer facing, staff.  I know of quite a few GWR staff that cannot wait to get out as soon as they can, or have even taken demotion due to the pressures they are facing.  Not good news for the railway industry in general.  I can imagine the chaos caused in the GWR Control when things like the NR failings mentioned come into play.  It must take many hours of hard work to get the crews and trains back to where they should be.

Edit to Add: I wonder if GWR get penalised by Hitachi if they deliver a train back late for maintenance or at the wrong depot?  I'm sure STUVING will know ;)

yup! 3 drivers needed to get the 1700 as far as Bristol TM last night....

I commuted with GWR for 3 years, the longest delay I had was 41 minutes when the Dawlish sea wall re-opened. Otherwise the occasional 5 or 10 minute delay.

You mention Dawlish. Was your journey on the Paignton branch?

Can someone explain to me why the Cotswold line is being prioritised? What upgrade works are currently being undertaken there? What level of service is the Cotswold line suffering from that it needs to be prioritised? Is it worse than the rest of the GWR route?

If you spend a few minutes reading this thread and this one

http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=19201.0

You'll get a good idea. Quicker than another member typing it all up again.

Newton Abbot to Exeter St Davids

From what I can see the Cotswold line is suffering from the same issues as the rest of the GWR network and shouldn't really stand out for additional attention.

Seriously? With daily disruption to the timetable, no  one knows which trains are running from day to day!

We could play a pretty depressing game of "my service is worse than yours", coming up with different answers depending on the measures taken.

Some places are clearly better than others, but there are several contenders for the booby prize for performance - it's not a one line race!

I think "slightly less awful" rather than "better" is the phrase you may be looking for, but the Cotswold line is clearly way ahead in the race to the bottom!  :)

I think the best performing line at the moment is the Gunnislake branch. That one rarely seems to be mentioned on this forum, on JourneyCheck or GWR's social media.

Perhaps GWR have been focusing all their efforts on this very important strategic line.  :P

I would single out the North Cotswold line simply because it’s suffering from cancellations on a daily basis rather than just on weekends.

As I mentioned on another thread, London to South Wales isn’t far behind because it’s just an hourly service on weekends so it doesn’t take many cancellations for you to be left with not much of a service on this line.

At least Bristol being half hourly it can take the odd cancellation or two but if you cancel three trains in a row (each way) like we saw last weekend this line can suffer too.

I really wish all was well on the Gunnislake line.  The service is usually very reliable but it has had its share of cancellations, train failures and short formed trains in recent weeks. 

I'm biased as I use the South Wales route. When you can't provide a service for 4 hours due to cancellations it's ridiculous! Then there is the issue of what's happened on days with major events on... like when GWR cancelled all trains after the rugby but they can provide extra trains for the Royal Wedding?

Could this be the reason for his conspicuous absence of late, he's taken on a part time job as a journalist.

Or maybe he's busy trying to sort out the mess made by Network Rail, you know the company which is state funded and everyone seems to love the idea of because it will be "better" (i.e cheaper and even worse) railways  ::)

I hadn’t realised until recently that apparently two 153s coupled together are banned from the Gunnislake branch which reduces flexibility when stock is tight.

I see the point you are making but in the case of the Royal Wedding aren’t GWR running longer trains rather than extra ones as the Windsor (GWR) branch runs at a 20 minute interval anyway - which is as much as you can do on the line. SWR are running extras.

Windsor and Eton Central can only take a 3 coach train and there is only one platform so there is not a much that GWR can do.  They can run a 3 coach shuttle instead of a 2 coach shuttle every 20 mins, but that is it really.

There's really no competition for travellers between "our" various lines - so the comparisons of who's faring better or worse are academic to a great extent. However, it is worthwhile using one another as benchmarks.

At yesterday's TransWilts AGM, one of the slides presented showed a current performance chart across each of the areas, allowing us to get a feeling of Cotswold v Thames Valley v South Wales to South Coast (our Westbury hub services) versus West Country branches.  Page 15 of Dan Okey's presentation at http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=19577.msg236776#msg236776 .

Ppm measures are against the timetabled plans for each day, so the starting point (100% performance) is not the published National Rail timetable from January to May, but rather the the planned service after disruption caused by the Newbury and other blockades have been taken out.     Looking at what the means with a TransWIlts service, for example, it means that although our normal service is 18 single journeys per day, the performance measure for last week would have classified just 7 journeys as 100% and the ppm figure quoted is based on degradation from 7 rather than from 18.

Dan Okey's presentation - do take a full look - also considers issues and measures being taken to address them. Perhaps not in the slides - confirmation that class 1 trains get priority over class 2; lots of people steaming about where freight should (and has been) fitting in the priority tree.

Any reason why?

I think it might be because of the curvature of Calstock station platform.