Great Western Coffee Shop

Has the default connection time changed?   I always understood it was 5 minutes unless otherwise noted, but staff at Chippenham this morning assure me the standard is 7 minutes.   Apparently that's to allow for late running trains and for passengers to change platforms.

I still think it was mean to close the doors of the Bristol train as the passengers from Melksham ran across the platform.  Not an official connection maybe, but it would have been a nice 5 second gesture to save 7 people half an hour.. Bit of a one-off this morning as the "Melksham Flyer" has been re-timetabled later than usual. On a regular timetable Saturday, it would have been a connection fair and square!

Having just looked in a current GWR timetable (T10, as it happens), I find "the standard 5 minute allowance" is still there.

Staff making up their own rules? Whatever next...

Paul

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it's a shame the timetables as a whole are not set so that all likely interchanges have at least the minimum connection time between them.

Indeed - though there are issues that make that very difficult to achieve.  The current timetable does reasonably well having been tuned (GWR) and nagged (Community inputs) into that shape over the years.  But when trains change because of engineering, there seems to be no time for tuning, and when we age we're told "too late" or "it's just for a few days".  Apparently, where there were 3 major possessions in 2012, there are 40 in 2018 (hope I have those figures right) and no-one's got the resource to do more than come up with a basic service - so what if a 2 hourly bus leaves 5 minutes before the usually-connecting train arrives?

We've had this worry over 50 days of no daytime service this year on the TransWilts, but the much bigger worry is the 2019 timetable which has connection and timing issues all over it.  Frankly, thank goodness it's not coming in month 1 2019 and probably not month 5 - may be month 9 or 12 or even 17.  As that gives a chance to at least correct the drafts which have all the SLC service slapped into them, and conform, but they're a disconnected setup where connections are random rather than a true network.

When the 2tph Paddington to Hayes & Harlington service transferred from GWR to TfL, they retimed the service slightly by departing 1 minute later and adding public timetable padding before arrival at Hayes. This broke the connection at Hayes & Harlington with the next GWR trains going further west! * The minimum connection time at Hayes & Harlington is 4 minutes, which used to be met in most hours. But now the public timetables only show a 1-3 minute difference between the TfL arrival and the GWR departure :(

Another case at Westbury tonight where a connection was broken with passengers still changing platforms. The 1857 Paddington to Plymouth was delayed at Thingley by the (very) late running Frome to Cheltenham service. It arrived 5 mins late at 2036 into platform 1 as booked.  The train manager then took 30 secs to release the doors.  The connecting Bristol service was from platform 3 and left on time at 2038 while passengers were still changing platforms and coming up the stairs. I was in the centre of the Plymouth train and just made the connection. If I had had heavy luggage I would not have.
Again this raises issues. As platform 2 was unoccupied, why wasn't the Plymouth service routed into that platform to give a cross platform change.  Failing that why was not the departure of the Bristol service delayed by a few minutes to ensure that everyone made the connection.  The time would probably be made up by Bristol in any case.  Those who didn't make it had their journey delayed by over 40 minutes as the following Portsmouth - Cardiff serviec is running 13 minutes late.  Rant over

There are 6 minutes of pathing allowance on this train prior to arrival in Bristol, 5 of which are between Freshford and Bath Spa. It had a three minute station stop at Bradford-on-Avon and left there late as a result, yet left Bath Spa early according to the working timetable (see attachment to this post).  Unless it was blocking something else between Westbury and Bradford-on-Avon / Bradford Junction, it could have waited an extra minute or two.

I have had incidents like this explained to me as "the way it's done" and "part of the system" as well as - more justified "it will hold something else up" or "less bad than the delay to other passengers on the train".    If it happens frequently because it's "part of the system", then perhaps the system should be looked at to consider / optimise passenger journeys rather than train's timekeeping.

That three minute stop at Bradford-on-Avon was most likely nothing of the sort, almost definitely in this case as there is no way the train could of left Bradford nearly 2 minutes late and only left Avoncliff 30 seconds late. There is no way to identify an accurate departure time from Bradford-upon-Avon when a train stops at Avoncliff as there is no means of a train reporting again until the train has arrived and departed Avoncliff. The reported departure time at Bradford-upon-Avon is based on if the train had not stopped at Avoncliff, obviously with a stop at Avoncliff the train will take longer to get to the next reporting point and therefore the dwell at Bradford will look longer.