It's precisely the long journeys that are disadvantaged by reservations. It's even worse on Cross Country (no thanks to those Voyagers managing in four cars the same seating capacity as a three-car 175). You can stand from Plymouth to York because of people getting unnecessary online reservations for a random scatter of miscellaneous 20-minute journeys. To a lesser extent, we get it on the London trains with reservations for journeys wholly within England on the Welsh trains and reservations wholly east of Cogload Junction on the South West ones.

Doesn't Broadgage have an overcoat to leave on his seat?

Stop offering reservations online, except for customers with disabled or senior railcards. They are in general an unmitigated pain. Make those who want them for the sake of causing smarmy confrontations go to a railway station and queue up.

Not my particular sector, but I quite enjoy my odd Saturday at time and a half or a Sunday at double time. I'd expected that such dedication would have extended to those spending our money too...

Do they assume that bus passengers are all retired and don't have jobs to go to during the week?

Maybe we need two lines then. Complement what you propose with Taunton - Bridgwater - Cossington - Glastonbury - Wells - (epic bit of new construction parallel to the Old Frome Road to get onto the S&D^▸ (Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway)) - Chilcompton - Midsomer Norton - Radstock - Wellow - Oldfield Park High Level - Bath Green Park


With a few reopened stations, a Swindon-Westbury-Taunton local service looks a good idea... Would get rid of messy reversals at Westbury too.


I'd hope a regional train like that would not stop at all those Bristol local stations.

Quite founded speculation really, seeing as the packages were posted from the Republic of Ireland. Much more likely than some bunch from elsewhere going to the bother of smuggling their stuff into the Republic just to post it from there and make it look like whichever version of the IRA did it.

But Bristol's getting an extra 2tph out of thin air (including stops at Bristol Parkway that are not being compensated for by taking them out of the South Wales services, so that Oxford-Cardiff passengers can get seats at Didcot) – surely one of those super-expresses could continue to Weston instead? There seems to be very uneven treatment going on here – Bristol and South Wales services have been pretty much equal for as long as I can remember, and now they're being massively slanted towards Bristol – is the person who came up with this from somewhere on the north side of Bristol, one wonders...

The Belfast Telegraph adds:

and the Llanelly Railway and Dock's Swansea Extension

I keep wanting this one to be stations served by Amtrak's late lamented Cape Codder. But I'm not aware of any station called Manuel.

5 stumps me. I think I can come up with something sensible for the others.

Any hope for getting Swansea up to 2tph in the pm peak? The current situation with short turns at Cardiff arriving at 1622 and 1723, where they'd be just about to be getting very busy indeed if they continued west, is absolutely ridiculous. That it currently goes up to 2tph after the pm peak is even more mad.

Part of me wonders whether it wouldn't be possible to convert some of the 5-car Hitachis to diesel/third rail and use them on the Portsmouth service. They'd be less bad there than on the Main Line.

Does this work for upgrading to First Class as well? So if a customer holds a season from NTH to CYS (only available as Standard), and wants to go back from CDF^» (Cardiff - next trains) in First Class (ideally on the 1825 on a Wednesday to get the "free" wine), then it should be £17.40 FOS minus £11.60 SOS equals £5.80. This would be very good value – seeing as the wine's usually £5, that's effectively an 80p upgrade.

And if I can do this, will the (TfW-operated) booking office at CDF have a copy of the weekly retail circular to be pointed to?