Great Western Coffee Shop

As well as the usual crew shortages, there are a number of cancellations and short runs today due to signalling staff being ill - I noted some of today's cancellations being listed last night.

I assume that this is COVID related and seems to mostly affect Thames Valley services and branch lines - would be interesting to know (roughly) how many signalling staff are usually required to maintain the service and how many have been affected.

Hope they all get well soon!

We've 6 supervisors, and 2 are off with BA.2; we've 2 relief supervisors and 1 also has BA.2.
Apart from 1 member, all have been fully vaccinated.
This new variant seems an even faster spreader than previous variants.

It almost seems inevitable that most of those fully vaccinated might catch this new variant, but with far reduced symptoms that don't need hospitalisation.

Hard to pinpoint but with west of England diversions and cancellations between Newbury and Bedwyn my guess would be lack of staff to run the crossing box at Kintbury.

It was a shortage of staff at TVSC, has meant that some desks had a period of time with no cover resulting in temporary closure of the area that desk covers.

This not just confined to TVSC, Nationally ROC's, IECC, Signalling Centres and Electrical Control Rooms etc have seen high numbers of staff having to self isolate due to testing positive for Covid.

This puts a lot of pressure on the rostering of these teams in these centres and control rooms, this has in some areas impacted on track access requests for maintenance and repairs

Cancellations to services between Reading and Westbury

Due to signalling staff being taken ill between Reading and Westbury all lines are blocked.
Train services running through these stations will be cancelled, delayed by up to 120 minutes or revised. Disruption is expected until the end of the day.

Customer Advice
Due to Network Rail signalling staff being unavailable, no trains are currently able to run between Reading and Westbury. Network Rail are in the process of resourcing additional signalling staff.

At least one west of England service (17:36 ex-Paddington) was diverted via Swindon and Melksham.  It was held, briefly, at Thingley waiting for the Melksham flier to come off the single line.   Nice to see the TW service wasn’t cancelled to make way for it. 

Same again tonight.....a number of Thames Valley services cancelled or starting/finishing short due to signalling staff being taken ill.

The UK Government Covid policy currently is "try to stay at home and avoid contact with other people"  For the time being Network Rail are maintaining a don't come to work policy if employees have respiratory / Covid symptoms until they feel better and able to come to work.

There are also a lot of the frontline staff who have a leave held over from 2020 and 2021, whilst this is being managed it is vital for the mental wellbeing of these staff and their families they are allowed to have a holiday 

Delays to services between London Paddington and Slough

Due to signalling staff being taken ill between London Paddington and Slough all lines are closed.

Train services running to and from these stations may be delayed by up to 30 minutes. Disruption is expected until 23:15 13/04.

Looks like a number of trains being held at Paddington, and stuck at various stations between Reading & Paddington.

Station staff shortages also mentioned and cancellations for similar reasons already being listed for tomorrow.

I did hear that the TVSC at Didcot was running with very little spare staff capacity and a growing reluctance to work overtime and/or additional shifts.

could be read as that on-board catering again!

Causing issues again today, longer distance services starting from/terminating at Reading rather than London and TV branches affected too.

Same deal today. Large numbers of cancellations in thames valley services.

The National Rail web site over the last day or three consistently shows a good service on GWR at a time that GWR consistently states that signalling centre operations are disrupted (could it be argued that signalling centre operations being disrupted should be a 'never event', and was it the likes of Ian Prossor who, not so long ago, were twitchy about signalling centres having created a single point of failure).

GWR's tweet earlier today:

https://twitter.com/GWRHelp/status/1517767098948366336

Mark

"Controlled disruption"......there's a new one for the bingo card!