Great Western Coffee Shop

Hi all

I've noticed that SWR run services Salisbury to Reading on some Sundays. Does anyone know why they are doing this?

Thanks
GWR 158

This enables SWR to run additional trains on Sunday mornings and afternoons when there is routinely reduced capacity available into Waterloo for any potential maintenance activities. Reading is really just somewhere to turn round, but also maintains route knowledge for any diversions. There is currently one late night service that does this too.

Rather than operate in service after that latish evening service into Reading, amazingly it returns ECS all the way to Salisbury!

In the normal working timetable it also runs via Southampton, and takes far longer than the obvious route. That might be why they don’t run it in service.

Paul

You mean ECS from Reading to Salisbury via Southampton? If so, why?!!

I think it’s theoretically for route knowledge training for diversions, there aren’t any normal public DMU services on the stretch from Basingstoke to Eastleigh, since the last few peak extras were converted to 450 operation a couple of years ago.

Paul

That makes sense. It's also been stated as the reason SWR run trains via Westbury from Salisbury to Yeovil, and why GWR run a daily service fro Southampton to Portsmouth via Eastleigh.

I note the OP says "some Sundays" - but which? None of those this month, for a start. And SWR's web site only has one place to put such temporary service changes, under "Engineering Works". There they do give notice for 31/10 and 7/11, and RTT does show these SWR trains running for the first time after today  on 14/11. But the line is closed on other Sundays before that (tomorrow and 24/10) without SWR mentioning it.

The other days they are not running are not due to engineering work. Not that they are running their own buses in any case; they say to use GWR or XC ones. I does look as if, on top of the lack of a place for notices of operational withdrawal of services, they see these ones as only running to suit themselves and not passengers' needs, so passengers don't need to be told at all.

The SWR Dec 2022 timetable consultation includes three services running each way Mondays-Thursday in the evening after peak. It is silent on the Sunday service.