Great Western Coffee Shop

Blimey - the lengths some people will go to to get to Swindon!!!  :)

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/news/passenger-mutiny-forces-packed-train-to-reverse/ar-AAP6poJ?ocid=msedgntp

According to RTT, there was no call at SWI?

https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:V70270/2021-10-03

And it was cancelled at Reading!  It was supposed to be non-stop from Taunton to Reading - I presume since it is marked STP it was diverted from the Berks & Hants due to engineering works. Son it was never due to stop at Swindon. 

But it was stopped for over 1.5 hours just west of Swindon. 

The train was due to make additional stops at Bristol TM and Bath due to both the 1730 and 1830 Bristol TM - Paddington having been cancelled due to staff shortages.

It picked up passengers at Bristol TM and Bath Spa with some of those assuming it was making calls at Chippenham and Swindon. There was, according to posts on social media, confusing station announcements, incorrect information from staff in Bristol and Bath, and constantly changing information on screens and displays. Under those circumstances it's perfectly understandable that people boarded at Bristol and Bath thinking this ex-Penzance train, already diverted from its usual route, would be calling at Chippenham and Swindon.

On board, the train was understandably packed after Bristol & Bath. Easy to miss PA announcements and impossible to go and find the Train Manager. In those circumstances one can understand the passenger alarm being pulled.

Bad job all round by GWR.

Whatever the exact circumstances, this sort of thing will hardly encourage rail travel in general, and GWR travel in particular.
Rail is already considered to be hugely complex and expensive, and unreliable.

This makes the "famous five" advertising campaign look increasingly silly. No amount of advertising compensates for this sort of thing.

"This is the XX-YY service from Penzance to Paddington. It may be diverted en-route, and might or might not make extra stops on the diversion or elsewhere. Change at Reading for London."

Get the basics right first.

Railway Byelaw 11.3: No person shall, without reasonable cause, activate any emergency system and/or any communications system provided on any part of the railway including a train.

Does a few (?) passengers potentially being overcarried constitute 'reasonable cause'. Absolutely not, under normal circumstances. But in this case if one or more railway officers advised passengers that the service would make an additional Swindon call then GWR will have to take the hit.

If not then the responsible passengers should be ashamed of themselves.

Quelle surprise, the railway shoots itself in both feet, again, by not having communication channels adequately defined.

Strictly speaking, those passengers who operated the emergency alarm made things worse and could in theory be prosecuted.
Back in the real world their actions are understandable, and a "mutiny" or other protest does bring this sort of thing to public attention, and embarrass GWR and their hopeless weekend service.

I presume that any enquiry will focus on communications and information, and avoid any talk of the underlying causes of the problem, such as lack of staff and lack of trains.

But the utter stupidity of even thinking of doing so in such circumstances beggars belief.  It reminds me of the time a train manager or RPI threatened me with prosecution for failing to have a valid ticket and presenting him with something that wasn't even a travel ticket when asked.

Travelling home from Filton Abbey Wood in the afternoon on a Friday, I had asked for a single to Melksham at the ticket hut and been charged £10 for what looked like a standard ticket - all the coding stuff on it, and with "From Filton Abbey Wood" and "To Melksham" clearly printed on it.   I thought I was right and I trusted the staff member who sold it to me - £10 sounded about right, no warning flags.

Turned out I have been sold a weekend first upgrade, which that staff member on the Temple Meads to Chippenham leg of my journey told me wasn't a travel ticket, pointing out the various codes on it.  He said he would "let me off" because a Weekend First upgrade should not have been sold on a Friday, but warned me sternly that I would need to buy a proper ticket to get from Chippenham to Melksham - that I risked being in serious trouble if I tried to complete my journey using the piece of card I had, especially as I had already been warned; he kinda implied that his colleague on the Melksham train would be on the lookout for me or at the least need me to "talk my way though" as I had done with him and take the risk of having the book thrown at me.

Now - I'm a pretty hardened traveller, but this incident really shook me up - for sure, I was technically in the wrong. I was sufficiently shaken to catch the much slower bus back to Melksham ... and here I am remembering it 8 years later. Profound.

I would - hope - that there were no "jobsworths" around yesterday and unless passengers were deliberately being naughty (no evidence that they were - the naughtiness is with the rail industry for failing to provide!) they should be looked after and apologised to ... not told (even here, even in passing) that they are liable for prosecution for pulling the chord, travelling beyond their station, or anything else.


Edit to add - See http://www.passenger.chat/12887
(http://www.wellho.net/pix/w1stfri.jpg)

↑↑↑ What he said. <round of applause>

Potential prosecution should not feature at all in GWR's responses to customers on that train. Only what's morally right need be discussed.

There's also the knock on effects on following services to consider....or not in the case of those responsible.  As I understand it, just cause for such action is when passenger lives/saftey are at risk and this, as far as I can see, was not the case.  Indeed, it could be argued that such actions could potentially compromise passenger and staff safety.

If you were on a train that ran though a station where it should have stopped ... might you not feel, especially if you were not a rail regular, that the train might be running away ... (Edinburgh Waverley, August 2019 - it does happen!)

But, for goodness sake, let's not expect customers of the rail industry to be as fully informed and totally trained on all unusual circumstances as the staff, and require them to make perfect judgement calls when something doesn't work as it should.

A TOC would never prosecute in these circumstances. Evidence for starters - good luck identifying. Grossly overcrowded train. Inability to contact TM. Proving malicious intent or mens rea. Arguing 'reasonable cause'. That's a lot of cost, effort and bad publicity to go through for a maximum return of £1000. In reality any such fine will be much less.

What ought to be looked at is a separate, "If you require assistance..." contact system. Or a Passcom that doesn't immediately put the anchors on until communication with staff is established. Many trains are already fitted with such.

IET emergency alarms don’t immediately put the anchors on.  The driver has a foot pedal that can override it like most (all?) modern trains.  A CCTV image from the nearest camera then gets displayed to the driver and they can speak to whoever has activated the alarm in theory. 

Though like any out of course situation it’s not always possible for all the various procedures to work like clockwork.

Okay, difficult to make a call on, I agree.  Difficult to enforce potentially as well.   Call me a bit old fashioned though but I would worry if there was a resulting slippery slope tendency towards increasingly loose interpretation of what constitutes proper use.
But that's just me and maybe I've unwittingly pressed the "silly old fool mode" button! 

I did state that passengers operating the emergency alarm could be prosecuted IN THEORY but was not advocating or suggesting such an action.

Not even heard of anyone being charged a penalty fare !

This chat reminds me of this (https://www.bethsnotesplus.com/2015/10/to-stop-the-train.html) - taught to me by my mother many moons ago.

"If you require assistance, please choose from the following menu.
Choose one to report a crime or dangerous situation.
Choose two for a medical emergency.
Choose three for lost property.
Choose four if you have become separated from the rest of your party.
Choose five for mobility assistance.
For anything else please choose nine."

Customer then chooses nine.
"hello this is customer services, please be aware that calls are recorded [insert long and tedious message about data protection] Your call is important to us and will be answered shortly" [18 minute wait]
Train goes into tunnel and call terminated.

"This is customer services------------"repeat as needed.

We didn’t discuss it yesterday in the ‘shortage of traincrew thread’, but things became a right mess in the afternoon and evening when a number of Bristol-London trains were cancelled at fairly short notice leaving what would already have been very busy diverted SW services (remember semi fasts were starting from Castle Cary) to pick up passengers from Bristol, Bath and Chippenham right during the Sunday afternoon/evening peak return to London.

GWR did run a shuttle service using 387s between Swindon and London but the problem was much further down the line.

I would suspect GWR will say it was either cancelling the diverted SW beyond Bristol or cancelling the Bristol to London trains.

Perfect storm really. Let’s remember that weekend travel is now much busier than at times during the week. Weekends have always been best avoided, now more so.

The same afternoon GWR tweeted about taking the train to Bath, not great timing. Needless to say it got a response it from a few disgruntled customers!

Having brought the train to a stand at least there have been no reports of people using the emergency door release and walking along the tracks. 

Presumably no station was within sight or known to be nearby.

There's an insider's version of what happened on railforums (https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/passenger-mutiny-due-to-missed-stop-at-swindon.223038/page-2#post-5337887) - with some omissions of what can't be said from inside. The key is that the Swindon stop (and Chippenham too) was announced before departure, but withdrawn en route. I presume that was before it left Taunton; any later would be a serious problem in itself. Even if done earlier it creates a huge customer information problem, with the obvious potential for what happened to happen. 

On timings, from liverail:
passed    Swindon 19:13 20 late (P3)
arrived    Swindon 20:26 off-route, so no timetable entry, and no platform shown
departed Swindon 20:35 off-route, so no timetable entry
arrived    Reading  21:01 104 late, terminated (due to crew hours and return stock timing)

As usual, whatever was decided as the "solution" wasn't quick to arrange.

Thanks Stuving for copying that to us. From a quick read there does not seem to be any clear answer to the question "were passengers told clearly and audibly that the stop at Swindon had been withdrawn?". Even if this had been announced on the train, the quality of announcements (especially volume levels) is very variable and the accuracy of "walking writing" notices is also poor with errors often occurring. It looks and sounds as if it was too crowded for train staff to walk through making announcements in person to passengers.

If the train had been announced and "advertised" as stopping at Swindon, then once there were passengers on board travelling there it should not have been changed en route. To do so, especially in these circumstances and in the absence of (for example) the train suffering a failure causing it to be cancelled was a disaster waiting to happen. From the information here presented the only "problem" was the train was 20 minutes late at Swindon. That cannot justify a decision to cut stops out after passengers for those stops have boarded.

 

From what I've read, the special stop order for Chippenham and Swindon was rescinded while the train was at Bath Spa. This was apparently done by Control after consultation with the train crew.

Perhaps the train crew advised Control that the train was too overcrowded to take on more passengers. Its equally possible that the scheduled crew change at Bristol didn't happen, bearing in mind the driver shortage on Sunday afternoon. This may have meant that the existing crew were going to be out of place and/or out of hours.

It's also seems that Control messed up. To add a special stop order, then remove it appears to be main cause of the subsequent problems. Contributing factor being GWR's inability to roster sufficient staff on a Sunday.

Whatever the reasons it's very apparent that communication to passengers was lacking. Said passengers can't be blamed for possibly missing announcements. The general hub-bub on an overcrowded train can easily drown out PA.

The more charitable customers will regard this a yet another GWR c0ck up, to add to the many others, not actively malign but simply incompetent. No matter what excuses may be made as to just how hard it is to actually make the advertised stop. And even harder to make it all the way to London.

The less charitable believe that there is some actively malign policy to actively make things worse.
I do NOT agree with this second view, but it is widely held.
"Why did they advertise a stop, but then not actually stop the train at that station"?
"Because they can" ! Is a fairly widely held view.

I would imagine there was an uncomfortable tea with no biscuits meeting in one of the briefing rooms at Milford House this morning. If there wasn’t there jolly well should have been!

But let’s not forget the elephant in the room here and that was the cancellation of three consecutive Bristol to London trains was down to the same problem…shortage of train crew! This is what caused an already busy train from the SW being boarded by three loads of passengers who had been waiting at Bristol.

I’m in no doubt that with the train already full to bursting after it stopped at Bath, along with knowing there were many passengers further up the line waiting for a train to London that the decision was taken not to stop at Chippenham and Swindon.

I’m sure lessons will be learned from what happened last night, but until you have enough crew to run the advertised timetable this problem will never go away. Traveling with GWR on weekends is a complete lottery.

TWO elephants in the room, not just lack of staff but lack of trains.

FGW as they were then known had a miserable record regarding weekend staffing, since long before the pandemic. Might be a bit better next year, but for how many years have we heard that ?

And as regards lack of trains, the failed IET project and the much smaller but even more failed 769 project seem unlikely to improve any time soon.
Remember all the promises made in previous years regarding both long distance and local services ? 70 short formations today.

And of course GWR are still operating the reduced "covid mode" timetable. Any attempt to return to a full service would make both the staff shortage and the train shortages even worse.

If they really have that few crew/trains as to end up with two-and-a-half-hour gaps in service, the least disruptive thing would be to plan to cancel the Reading-Paddington legs of some (or even most) Intercity trains and have London passengers transfer to the Relief Lines or the South Western at Reading.

I really don't see why there would be a lot of passengers towards London from Swindon to board 1A58. Some of the cancelled trains from Bristol did run from Swindon, including 1A27 at 18:10 and 1A29 at 19:11. These show in RTT as class 80x, but I understand they were 387s (of unknown length).

So 1A29 left Swindon P3 a couple of minutes before 1A58 turned up there. That decision taken at Bath, by Control in consultation with 1A58's crew, is getting even harder to understand.

Journeycheck was showing the Swindon-Paddington services as 8 carriages.

Wish I had recorded the cancellations and these replacements in the shortage of traincrew thread little knowing what was going to happen. Saw GWR were stopping services up from the SW to cover for the cancelled Bristol to Paddington services thinking they will be pretty busy. You could see from both Journeycheck and RTT that things were getting messy.

Possibly worth considering as a SHORT TERM EMERGENCY measure until they have enough staff and enough trains.
However a connecting service via Reading is a powerful disincentive to travel if compared to a through service.
Great care would have to be taken that changing at Reading does not become the new normal but remains a short term measure.
The painfully slow service to Waterloo is not a serious contender except on really bad GWR days or those who wish to be at Waterloo without a cross london transfer.

SWR wasn't really a viable option from Reading yesterday.  Engineering work meant it was road transport as far as Virginia Water.

Putting thousands of people on already busy suburban services doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.  Not to mention the fact that a hefty percentage of crews working trains between Reading and Paddington are based at Paddington so they would still have to get to/from there anyway - they might as well do it working a train!

But we're told that London suburban ridership has collapsed and that those trains are running around at about 20% of their pre-pandemic ridership – carrying vast amounts of air in massive long trains that used to be occupied by office workers for very small periods of time (and not at all on Sundays). That's where the slack is, as identified by the real-world version being running commuter units all the way out to Swindon. Using them as a Reading-London shuttle instead would be a much better use of resources that would result in most of the railway running as normal, apart from the extreme eastern end – much better than leaving massive gaps on the Bristol-Swindon segment where there is no corresponding local service (Corsham and Wootton Bassett being lower priorities in the Civil Service mindset than Iver and Hanwell). And that sort of thing would get better once the Elizabeth Line opens properly: Intercity destinations to central London destinations would still be a single change whether at Paddington or Reading.

Someone who was on the train concerned (new member ‘Trainmiles’) has reported on the same thread stuving posted a link to earlier what happened:
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/passenger-mutiny-due-to-missed-stop-at-swindon.223038/page-4

Towards the bottom of page.

Not sure I can quote from another forum.

No problem I can see in doing so from the Coffee Shop viewpoint ... the other forum may have its rules and guidelines, as may the author there. Typically a good idea to quote only a very modest amount in critical review, provide a link, state the source ... you've got well along the way towards that anyway

Later on in that thread on RailUK the same new member states categorically that he heard no announcements on board regarding no longer stopping at Chippenham and Swindon.

Elsewhere it is suggested there was a PA fault in some carriages. If this was known at Bath Spa then it should have been behoven of staff to board each carriage, gain attention and shout the message. Or indeed use a bullhorn if available. May have been prudent to do this regardless of the PA situation.

A few more minutes at Bath Spa doing this would have been infinitely preferable to what subsequently occurred.

Yeah, I know. Hindsight.

It would have been simpler still to make the extra stops that had been advertised earlier.
To avoid making the overcrowding worse, let passengers OFF at Swindon but at Swindon do not advertise the platform to be used or the destination of the train to deter more from boarding.

For such a new train to already be experiencing dodgy PA isn’t very good.

The only way that could have sensibly been done at Swindon would have been putting the train into the Down platform (Platform 4) without announcing the arrival. IETs are programmed to show the next stop on the side of the carriage, so pax waiting on Platform 3 would attempt to get on. I doubt whether platform staff would want to prevent boarding.

The manual PA system on most units is very poor. I've been sat on a sparsely populated 159 and had to ask the guard when he walked through what his last announcement was as it was barely audible - yet the automated announcement was loud and clear (and incorrect!)

One to bring up with Mark Hopwood at our AGM in 10 days? Get the actualities from the horse’s mouth

Do you think MH will want to talk about it? Wasn’t exactly GWR’s finest hour.

Yes, he’s very open usually…

I would hope he will address the root cause (ie staff shortage) and not only at weekends now.....he is 100% accountable for resolving it and yet very little seems to be happening.

He did at the MMPA AGM recently. A lot down to training requirements, they’re around a year short of where they should be in terms of driver training. But we can ask again

I very much doubt that MH will want to talk about this particular incident in detail. It would be hard to say too much without opening other worm cans.
More likely IMHO to make a rather general statement about "lessons being learnt, and procedures being reviewed, and communications being improved"

Cant say too much about lack of staff, apart again from a generally re-assuring statement about "recruitment and training going well despite the challenges of the pandemic"

Cant say too much about the failed IET project, again beyond generalities such as "We and our industry partners are all working very hard to overcome problems, but progress has been slowed by the pandemic"

I have more faith in Mr. Hopwood than in some railway managers, but criticising his company in any significant way is not on, and neither is any serious criticism of the new trains, nor of the government department that ordered them.

It doesn't need to be in detail....as long as lessons have been identified - he would then discuss these -  and he confirms that they will be learned....he can then be held to account.

The main one being that if you make a decision to add stops, you only reverse that decision in very exceptional circumstances.  With a ‘set down’ policy instigated should crowding become an issue.

Couldn’t agree more, and the one I’d major on should he be willing to chat…

I fail to see how a 'set down' policy would work. I've been at Exeter St Davids on a Summer Sunday when Up Londons have been dangerously overcrowded. A member of station staff has announced that 'the arriving train is already full and standing, please wait for the next train' and folk still board the train unimpeded.

Quite simply you don’t announce it at all and you remove it from the station CIS.  Sure, the odd person might get on, but the majority won’t.  As long as more people leave than join then you’ve improved the situation.  The crew also have the ability to easily put a ‘not in service’ message or blank the external displays on the IETs.

Just working that one through using Phil's example - summer Sunday afternoon at Exeter St Davids, platforms busy, almost certainly soaking up a number of long distance cancellations given that it's a summer Sunday and staff don't want to work.......train pulls in, a few people get off, already delayed customers ask platform staff ("Is that a London train?") - what are they supposed to say in reply? "Yes, but you can't get on"?

Given a busy platform, with the best part of an hour to wait for the next train, how do you think that'd play out?

In the case of Exeter all trains stop there so you wouldn’t have a situation where a stop there was added and then subsequently removed.

There's always the good old announcement that goes "this train is set-down only; any passengers joining the train without a valid ticket will be required to pay the full fare from Plymouth/Newport/Inverkeithing".