Great Western Coffee Shop

Following up on "GWR service change plans" from earlier today, here is the background relating to rolling stock.

1. The 769s are supposed to take over the North Downs line and that releases turbos to the Bristol area in readyness for running Bristol to Gloucester every half hour, and Bristol to Westbury every half hour.

2. The reduction in train length from 12 to 8 carriages into Paddington releases class 387 units which can then be used to provide an hourly semi-fast service from Paddington to Newbury, in turn allowing 3 x IET units to be released and head west replacing Castle class sets.

3. The removal of the super-fast plans for the foreseeable future releases, I believe, a further quantity of IETs which can replace Castle class sets

4. The removal of the Brighton service releases a class 158 train. This makes up for the one out of service because of the Salisbury Tunnel accident.

The move to replace HSTs with IETs is stated as being because the HSTs are the oldest and least environmentally friendly trains on the GWR fleet.   Whilst the 5 car IET has 12 standard seats less than an HST, it has an extra 36 first class seats - a net gain of 24.  We understand that leisure traffic has blossomed and many people are using the Penzance to Bristol services who would previously have use Cross Country.  I can't help if there's a further issue that the IETs have to be paid for even if they're sitting idle, but HSTs can be scrapped.

The move west of the IETs probably won't happen straight away in May ... more like the autumn.

The 769s will not be in passenger service for the May timetable change, and it would be fair to seriously doubt them for December too.

The DfT (aka Treasury) policy is reduce railway operating costs the reduced passenger revenue due to 'pandemic' is the reason given.  All of the rail business will have financial reductions in the funding form Government, NR for example has £100M cut in its maintenance budget year on year from April 2023.  The first 2 or 3 years will be easy to achieve, when GBR take control of NR and ToC putting TSR's (temporary speed restrictions) and even permanent speed restrictions in place will not have the 'schedule 8 payment' penalties it has today.

The danger is longer journey times, shorter trains and less frequent trains

Pity to loose the Castles: environmentally friendly or not I do quite like them although I guess one advantage of moving the Castles will be the ability to use electrics between Patchway and Cardiff Central and perhaps speed up the journey times a bit thereby?

Dave

The Castles, with a good load of passengers, are much more environmentally friendly than the same number of people in cars. And they are love and go-almost-anywhere trains.  One wonders about new leisure routes - do I dare ask "open access" - ?
Weymouth - Westbury - Swindon - Oxford - Leamington Spa - Birmingham.
Ashford - Brighton - Littlehampton - Chichester - Southampton - Westbury - Bristol - Cardiff - Swansea - Tenby

Are all of the available Castle bogies compatible with third rail?

Could we see a Castle in Go-op livery?

Talk on Saturday was of class 153s, but balking at the price of conversion and the inability to path beyond Swindon towards Oxford at 75 mph - also limited (7 year remaining) life of these trains.   Castles have a "high running cost" as I understand it, but is that a high daily cost or a high cost per mile, or cost per station stop?  Depending on the balance, could there be scope for a very new daytime leisure service ... all week in summer, Friday to Monday in winter ... perhaps even doing a TWaTs commuter service the rest of the week?

If the Castles go from GWR and XC lose their HSTs too, the capacity for servicing and maintaining HSTs becomes more expensive still and the full cost would be charged to the HST operator, adding to the overall expense of the operation.  Then there's traincrew and fuel too, to name just two other elements. The HST operator would need their own dedicated traincrew too as GWR/XC crew will quickly lose their official HST knowledge.   If the big shakeout on GWR and LNER releases a further two/three IETs, they might well be the best bet if the route they would be used on has strong enough potential demand and revenue.  Big ask.  I should imagine anyone who tries to come in with an open access operation between Bristol and Paddington using the paths GWR won't now be would be told to bog off by the DfT.   

In their dreams! ;D

The ASLEF reaction to the report on Stonehaven is that all HSTs should be scrapped due to low crashworrthiness.

See debate on http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=23891.0 (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=23891.0)

I saw that after I had posted this, thank you.  I have also been reading the debate on the RailUK forum.

Confirmation (sort of) - source and source within source unverified ...


Until (? if) the 769s enter reliable service, rolling stock is likely to be tight, me thinks?