There's similarly a bus stop on Harbour Drive next to the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff Bay with a very faded notice where the timetable should be about the withdrawal of services on some date in (IIRC^▸ (if I recall/remember/read correctly)) 2004.

At least you had an alternate route. I did fish out the phone on Monday night, and it was quickly apparent that we had no option but to sit it out at Paddington (in the lounge, so couldn't have been stuck anywhere better really; shame the wine finishes at 7pm!). Yes, we could have gone to Marylebone and then Oxford, but then there would be no Oxford-Hereford trains. I also looked at the possibility of going via Birmingham (very not permitted, but much faster than playing with Waterloo and getting stranded in Salisbury), but the Birmingham-Cardiff service finishes very, very early too.

It was Maidenhead on Monday as well. Looked like it happened a fair way west of the station, but that's probably just the stopping distance.

Interesting figures, thanks, Graham. I suppose we've just been incredibly unlucky this week. My wife and I got stuck at Paddington for 2½ hours on Monday night (and ended up 3 hours late back to Neath, thanks to some genius in Cardiff deciding that despatching the 2315 Cardiff to Carmarthen stopper right in front of us was a sensible idea – it would only have cost TfW a fair chunk in taxis for anyone trying to connect onto their train – really incredibly stupid even for TfW) and then yesterday my wife got held up by just over an hour. Nice Delay Repay money for us, but that isn't really the point.

Electric train mentions fast line separation fences. Is there some standard that these would need to be to for the emergency services to treat the Main and Relief Lines as two separate railways, and not insist on closing one when something happens on the other? That looks like a potentially sensible investment to keep the Delay Repay expenditure down!

Ipswich looks potentially useful as well, as Greater Anglia sell First Class Advances.

Not again...

06/04/2022 16:53

Lines have reopened between London Paddington and Reading following a person being hit by a train. Trains may still be cancelled or delayed by up to 60 minutes.

Berkshire can't be that bad, can it?

Hello to anyone else in the Lounge at Paddington this evening...

Given how much time the train an hour behind it is losing on the Berks and Hants, that was probably an excellent call.

I've had a drainpipe come down, but hopefully plastic piping will just push back together once it's safe to cimb a ladder.

As I understand it, this was a Network Rail decision to close the entire Wales "Route". This certainly caught Avanti by surprise, who had intended to run a couple of journeys to/from Holyhead.

Bit odd that they've gone for terminating both the Paddington-Swansea and Cardiff-Taunton services at Bristol Parkway from opposite directions, plus the Cheltenham Spa service at Swindon. Paddington-Cheltenham and Swindon-Bristol Parkway-Taunton would have made much more sense.

I'd question the identification of services to plan to cancel. The first choice should always be to cancel the West Ealing to Greenford service and arrange ticket acceptance with London Buses (which provide a much superior service to the vast majority of potential passengers in any event on that utter basket case of a line). The second choice should be to cancel the diagram that includes the 0742 Oxford to Paddington, which has a Marylebone train one minute behind it and another fast Paddington train 11 minutes later – this is exactly the commuter market that has collapsed due to WFH^▸ (Working From Home).

Okay, let's rephrase that. They're telling us that at 0628 they don't have enough drivers and half an hour later that they don't have enough trains to avoid running those awful 5-car units on their own. Those really ought to be mutually exclusive types of cancellation/half-cancellation on any sensible railway, whether we inhabit a world where staff in the depot are empowered to put out the 9-car set from the 0628 half an hour late, or if some Dickensian miseriguts in Swindon has the right to decide whether or not to generate designer congestion by leaving the bigger units parked in Swansea.

(As it happens, because enough people are panicking more than me, it didn't matter. I had visions of First Class full by Bridgend. Actually only one other passenger briefly joined me in there. Epic win on the biscuit front!)

My guess would be that they've put a 9-car unit on it and still not moved the starter signal at Carmarthen about 70ft nearer the points.

Yes, ironic that the most reliable of the South Wales trains was the one cancelled! But the staff at Swindon were brilliant. They issued me with a supplementary travel authority and sent me via Bath (in First Class). With how busy the train between Bath and Westbury was, I was glad to have succeeded in avoiding Bristol Temple Meads on the little trains in the present circumstances.