Great Western Coffee Shop

In all my years of being interested in and working for the railway, I have never understood the logic or reasons behind unadvertised stops. Now might be a good time to ask those insiders on the group about it because it seems relevant next week.

One of the overnight extras between Paddington and Bristol on Monday morning leaves at 0134. Its first stop is Didcot at 0209 (set down only), then carries on to Bristol with unadvertised stop at Swindon and Bath, arriving at Bristol at 0300. This stop is also unadvertised

I see it is running with headcode 1Z70 which might indicate something, rather than the usual 1Cxx

If it was supposed to be a fast just to Didcot only and then on ECS to Bristol I could understand that, but it presumably would run as a class 5 train beyond Didcot

Can anybody shed some light on the matter?

I've heard several reasons given.   One is that a station is unlit / unstaffed / locked / unsalted and so cannot be used for passengers, but it's useful for people  who work for the railways.   Another is for timetabled trains that don't always go the same way - useful for staff if the happen to go through "x" and call, but a nightmare is it's a public call the train can't make as it then needs rail replacement road transport which costs much more that the fares .

A regular example is the up sleeper which, when routed that way, calls at Swindon just after 3am for staff only.

I understand it’s part of a long standing staff agreement to transport crew to Reading for early morning services. 

Here's an interesting one....... 1C80  12:04 London Paddington to St Austell on 5th November is shown on journey planners as not stopping at Plymouth, yet RTT shows it stopping for 8 minutes 'for dividing purposes'.

Journey planners show Paddington to Plymouth as 'change at Taunton' !

This conundrum gets more interesting the more I look into the clues available on RTT.

Both Bath and Swindon have an overnight service in the small hours of Monday 19th, but all the others are going eastbound. This is the only westbound train that night outside of normal timetabled hours.  There is some logic in this, because I suspect that more people will be wanting to go to London on the day of the funeral rather than leaving it. But if both stations are open to the public it sees odd that this one is the only one with unadvertised stops. To my mind, if you are planning to stop a train then you may as well advertise it and possibly pick up some trade from it