Great Western Coffee Shop

Lines closed between Slough and Reading around 11:30 due to an incident. Mother currently stuck on 1C78 heading to Tiverton.

Due to the police dealing with an incident near the railway between Slough and Reading some lines are closed.
Train services running to and from these stations will be cancelled, delayed or revised. Burnham and Taplow will not be served. Disruption is expected until 14:00 10/12.
Customer Advice
South Western Railway are passing GWR ticket holders via any reasonable route between Reading & London Waterloo. London Ungerground are passing GWR ticket holders across London between Paddington and Waterloo stations.
Further Information

If you hold a valid single, return, or weekly ticket, you will be able to claim compensation for delays of 15 minutes or more. Please keep your ticket and visit GWR.com/DelayRepay
Last Updated:10/12/2019 11:44

MODS: Apologies for the duplicate posts on this topic, got a MySQL error so thought it hadn’t posted.

Fatality at Taplow being reported.

Other thread removed ... NO PROBLEM about double posts; I know it's happening and will take a much more detailed look at the issues this evening!

Relief lines apparently to be reopened soon.

GWR Twitter saying all lines reopened but this isn't reflected (yet) on journeycheck

Journeycheck is saying problems until 5pm, but also introducing some cancellations on fast services.  :(

I took a friend down to Tilehurst Station at 1300 and saw the dreaded "Delayed" against every service. I drove her into Reading to catch a fast train to Paddington - no problem at that time of day, though a pain in the evening rush hour down Oxford Road - and back again.

But I wondered why the local info screens couldn't give some idea of when the next train might arrive. With the incident being at Slough, there must have been some local services running between Reading and Didcot.

Some of us will know of the electronic track diagrams on the walls of some of the escalator towers at Reading, which show the positions of all trains within four miles or so of Reading and their ETAs there. I wonder what data they were displaying this morning?

Later I checked the National Rail website retrospectively; the 1151, 1222 and 1253 Tilehurst-to-Reading services were cancelled but the 1323 and next two services were on time. The 1323 was just eight minutes away when I decided to drive into Reading!

Not complaining, just curious. Of course I recognise that incidents like this one is a tragedy for the victim and their family and friends – and that many others were far more inconvenienced than I was.

Marlburian

As I understand it the person’s body was spotted by a passing driver and it wasn’t immediately clear how they came to be there or whether they had been hit by a train.  Police obviously have to adopt a different way of working in those circumstances. 

My friend texted me that she had a 35-minute wait at Reading to catch a fast train to Reading. Ironically,when she's in this country (she's a Slovak living in Portugal)  she normally stays with friends in Wimbledon and uses SWR to get to Reading. I'd cautioned her about the industrial action but, as it happened, this time she was staying close to Paddington, so naturally opted for GWR.

Had she been going back on SWR, she might just have caught the 1312 (leaving 8 minutes late) at Reading and certainly the 1342 (on time).

Marlburian

Second one this week......

Cancellations to services between London Paddington and Maidenhead
Due to a person being hit by a train between London Paddington and Maidenhead all lines are blocked.
Train services running to and from these stations may be cancelled or delayed. Disruption is expected until 16:30 12/12.

Reported elsewhere to be at Taplow again.

The usual lack of information at Paddington for customers being reported and confused & contradictory advice being given over whether they can travel via Waterloo to Reading etc.

That explains the chaos at Reading. I was heading Soton to Worcester so was able to stay on Cross-Country as far as Oxford. RealTime Trains indicated lots of services being turned at Reading, and to be fair the Great Malvern train has arrived only a few minutes late - albeit we're not moving yet.

A nightmare for the operators.

According to twitter responses, SWR not passing GWR tickets to London owing to strike timetable ie fewer trains

There is no strike today, just chaos because "the trains are in the wrong places".

You genuinely couldn't make it up.

Presumably this is just GWR Advanced tickets. Because every other ticket is valid from either Waterloo or Paddington to Reading. One has to buy one's Underground fare normally.
I assume that SWR get a small percentage of every ticket LON-RDG because of this.

Was caught up in this today on the way home. If I had known before arriving on the platform at PAD I would have gone to Chiltern at Marylebone and argued my case.

It was still causing problems past 21-00. Eventually I caught a train that got me back home in time to be the last person to vote at my polling station - 21-59:30!

It will be interesting to see what TfL Rail has to offer in any way different to current policy on reducing accidents at Taplow etc.

TFL have been manning the station from first to last in advance of Sunday. There was certainly somone there Wednesday at 16:15.

The waitng room on platform 3 was open. Warm Bright and Clean.

Taplow station has changed beyond recognition (for the better) since TfL took over, and that's no disrespect to Ted whom we all admired!

SWR made no attempt at running a normal timetable - trhey continued with the strike timetable and paid all their staff too

Would have been difficult to have done so for just one day and the RMT would have known that.

Well they published a ‘running timetable’ for a month in advance so if they failed to get out of bed that day it makes them look even worse than they actually are. Which is pretty awful to start.