From the brochure, I was struck by how the artist's impression looked different to current photos, then I read:


Perhaps we should have new mouldings on the HST^▸ (High Speed Train) power cars, sets reduced to 2 + 6 to improve acceleration, running regional services such as hourly Cardiff -> Portsmouth and Paddington -> Newbury and all stations to Taunton ...

If you can post links to the two threads you're talking about, we can have a go at answering specifically ...

Taking an initial guess, threads sometimes start off apart and drift into the same direction;   sometimes they get merged and at other times an attempt at merging would result in an unfollowable honeycomb of mixed posts.

On a rail forum, we also have a network issue; trains run through from one route to another so things will turn up in multiple places ...  London to Reading, through the upper Thames Valley and onward to the Cotswold line to Worcester, Great Malvern and Hereford.  And on the Worcester to Great Malvern section, we're talking of a line / board that's shared with a train from Brighton via Bristol too ...

And perhaps very occasionally a DEMU^▸ (Diesel Electric Multiple Unit) ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF2ZqEX7LEM

http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/story-17767613-detail/story.html?

The story doesn't quote actual fares, but does mention Llanelli to Cardiff.  I looked it up .... Anytime Day Single, Llanelli to Cardiff, 12.80. At 55 miles, that's a new price of 23p per mile.

I've just checked at random - Wednesday 20th March, and there's a 17.50 ticket available on the 19:01 train, getting to Bearstead at 06:39 on Thursday morning. There's also a 29.50 fare on the 17:21 (00:15 into Bearstead), and 36.00 on the 23:06 sleeper getting in at 07:49.  Plenty of tickets at 53.50.  On my own "home journey" - London to Melksham, I am quoted 8.50 on the 23:30 train that day, which involves waiting on the platform at Swindon from 00:47 to 06:12, with other fares starting at 41.00.

As train travel gets ever more popular, and people get more used to looking around for better deals too, the best bargains will have become harder to find, even if they're sold in the same quantity they were sold in before.

I don't know of any source of information which tells us how the numbers of tickets in each bracket for sale (and actually sold) has changed, and I'm not actually sure what form the information would have to be presented in to convince us / me that it provided straightforward information ... can anyone help with this?  Perhaps one of our members who works for FGW could follow up with some figures?

Because the fare scales were re-jigged when the HSTs^▸ (High Speed Train) were initially introduced, with a premium fare payable for the premium, long distance routes.  Swindon is the first station out of the South East area, so you'll find lower fares into London from Bedwyn, Salisbury, etc, to the south, and from Oxford, Moreton-in-Marsh and Evesham to the north, and from Didcot to the east.

It's a bit ironic that these premium rate fares for fast new trains have remained for so long that they're still applied (with that same premium balance) to the same trains .... now amongst the oldest still running on the rail network.  


Yep ... HST premium again!

There probably is a greater seating capacity from Oxford ... simply because the train starts empty from there, rather than having a proportion of the seats already occupied by through passengers from Banbury.   Even the same old train would have offered more seats from Oxford if it had been altered to start from there, rather than coming through part-loaded from further north!

"Front 4 coaches for Caterham, rear 2 for Tattenham Corner".   I remember my youth catching trains from Charing Cross, and every half hour the Caterham / Tattenham Corner train left.   Always seemed very clear to me, and I suspect that there were very few problems with people being in the wrongpart of the train ... but then traffic was mostly regular passengers, for whom the railway journey was a part of daily life ...

"Front 2 coaches for Bristol, rear 3 coaches for Cheltenham" and let's add "front coach only for Yetminster, Chetnole, Thornford and Avoncliff, third coach for Melksham".  And that was a recipe for nearly every group joining the train asking where to get in for ... Yeovil, Bath, Chippenham, Swindon.   With extra confusion caused by the fact that what came into the platform at Weymouth at the front left at the rear.

With knowledge that there's a potential issue - which we appreciated before the summer 2011 TransWilts trial service to Weymouth - these things can be planned for;  we had volunteers helping direct people onto the train, we went up and down the train letting people know that they were in the section for Bath / Bristol, or Chippenham / Swindon / Cheltenham, and to my knowledge no-one ended up unexpectedly in the wrong portion. 

Splitting a train en-route isn't necessarily a problem, provided that you do tell people.  The worst chaos we had in the summer of 2011 was when the decision was taken, after departure from Weymouth, to send the front portion to Cheltenham and the rear portion to Bristol.  5 carriages of day-trippers, many with buggies and pushchairs (which in effect means they only have the mobility of disabled customers), all having to move from one carriage to another.   Happy days - it was all done with goodwill, save for the overcrowing on the TransWilts portion after it had left Westbury.

At 40.7p / miles (that't the Bedwyn to London peak rate single), the cost of the Westbury -> Paddington day travelcard might have been expected to have risen to 89.50 plus whatever the travel card addon is - say to 98.00 And on this basis, the old fare (up to 17th December 2012) at 80.00 was not wildly out of line with being a reasonable fare from Wiltshire to London, and indeed it was already substantially higher than a Westbury to London (via Salisbury) ticket.

So ... the price goes up from 80.00 to 154.50 on 17th December, then up again to 158.50 on 3rd January - that's a 2.6% rise yesterday.   It's disengenuous to describe the 2.6% rise as an "annual" rise - to me that means a rise that occurs once a year.   I hadn't even realised that some fares had gone up in mid-December.  Can we look forward to other fare rises in another couple of weeks time too??

Read me elsewhere - I am not against some of the lower fares rising to even out and clean up the fare system, and to ensure that the railways make a sensible income that will pay for most of the cost of operating the trains and network. And that includes some of my local fares such as Melksham to Swindon where an extra 25% income per passenger carried will make all the difference.  However, raising a fare by 97% over the space of a month, then claiming in the press that you've stuck to RPI^▸ (Revenue Protection Inspector (or Retail Price Index, depending on the context)) + 1% save for "rounding adjustments", is playing with words and makes it very hard for those of us "in the know" to trust what the spokesman says next time around.

It certainly makes for a useful comparison if you're wondering where to "railhead".  Here are the (anytime single) fares from the Berks and Hants line into London Paddington.   I've added Westbury -> Waterloo for people travelling to the South Bank - slower, but may save the tube.

Taunton 109.50 / 156 miles - 70.2 p/mile
Castle Cary 93.50 / 125 miles - 74.8 p/mile
Westbury 37.60 (via Salisbury) 76.00 (via Newbury) 87.50 (any Route) / 110 miles
   34.18 p/mile (via Salisbury), 69.1 p/mile (via Newbury), 79.5 p/mile (any route)
Pewsey 51.50 / 93 miles - 55.4 p/mile
Bedwyn 30.50 / 75 miles - 40.7 p/mile
Newbury 27.00 / 62 miles - 43.5 p/mile
Reading 21.50 / 42 miles - 51.2 p/mile

March 1985 is the latest possible month ... that's when the work started on resurfacing the platform, followed by the slewing across of the running line to run past the platform for the May 1985 re-opening.

I think it has been a tread of its own in the past.  But I'm delighted for you to (re)raise it as it's hugely important as to how the train operating companies think of the people who travel on on their trains.

I run a customer oriented business, and I refer to the good people who walk in through our door as customers.  And I believe that's a respectful term which indicates that these are people who choose to bring us their business, people we should look after, and people we should invest effort into making sure they have a good experience, and will want to come back and be customers for more of our services.   I'm reasonably happy to describe our hotel customers as "guests" too, as that also indicates the paramount importance of these people, without whom we wouldn't have a business.

How is showing this sort of respect for the people who in the end pay to keep the thing running "patronising"?   It may not sound right - perhaps that's because certain monopolies are a long way from being the true service industry that cares for its customers that they should be 

from http://www.thisisdorset.co.uk/story-17731824-detail/story.html?

At 118 miles , that's a fare of just under 19 pounds, Dan ... only available tomorrow as an advanced fare on the 22:35 as far as I can see, getting into Paddington at 00:34 on Thursday.  Also, there's a 38.70 day return, superoffpeak, Bristol to London Waterloo via Salisbury; choice of 7 services to London and about the same number back.

I'm slightly surprised that it's this particular fare level - enjoyed by only a tiny minority - that FGW^▸ (First Great Western) are choosing to benchmark against.

We concluded 2012 with the busiest month of 2012 - no fewer that 1982 new posts, in what's usually quite a quiet month as people head off for a Christmas break.  But this year was different - perhaps because of how difficult train travel was for many people looking to get away - see http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=11794.msg123310#msg123310

In the final quarter of 2012, we had 88,504 visits to the coffee shop of which 83,502 were identified as being from within the UK^▸ (United Kingdom).  Many people visit us multiple times - Google Analytics tells us that we've had 37,858 unique visitors in that period, which is an impressive number - it helps put some sort of measure onto "guests" who are an an important part of our customer base - reading and learning from the material here, but leaving such a light footprint that they're not often noticed.

December was the busiest month of the whole of 2012 on this forum - which is quite remarkable for a month which includes the Christmas holiday season, and at the end of a year which had included so much to talk about on Reading, Crossrail, Electrification, IEP^▸ (Intercity Express Program / Project.), and on refranchise both on our own Greater Western Lines and on the West Coast Main line.

So why was December so busy?    Because to some extent people visit this forum and post here when things aren't going very well - when their daily journeys fail, when the feel they're being fed a pup, and when there's the feeling of unfair fare rises.   And December was a disaster, operationally, for the railways.

I'm not going to turn around and blame FGW^▸ (First Great Western) for the whole series of things that have been going wrong. Flooding. Landslips. Train Faults. Signalling system faults. Points failures. Fires. Lack of available staff. Not running any trains on the busiest shopping day of the year. Overrunning engineering works. But FGW are the major point of contact to the travelling public by rail in our area, and so it falls on them to make sure that their suppliers in turn provide resources and infrastructure that are reliable, fit for purpose, and available when promised in the timetable.    And that's simply not happened - be it with advise not to travel (at one extreme) through to replacement of 8 coach trains with 3 coach trains, with reservations thrown out of the window and occasional travellers who have timed their journey to travel in comfort finding themselves josting for seats (if they're lucky) on a long distance train comprised of stock designed for suburban hops.

At times that things are going wrong, it's hard to provide clean and accurate information to the travelling public, but at times many travellers have felt that there's been a lack in even the limitied information supply, with customers simply not being told what's going on. It took quite a while for the reasons for the lines from Paddington being shut in the week before Christmas to come out (electrical fire), and you have to wonder why the reasons were hidden behind what seemed like a cloak of secrecy. It's on occasions that things go wrong that your customer can be your greatest ally; keep him infrormed, and he'll be on your side.   But not everyone has learned that lesson - or perhaps there's just been so much going wrong that the word "occasion" doesn't apply any more and the customer is getting to be less accepting of a continual flow of excuses for not delivering a service to the required level.

And so we head into January, and the "annual" range of fare rises (though there are other 'changes' midyear!).   The headline says "1% above inflation" and a First Great Western Spokesman says "We have used the Government guidelines as the basis for all our fare changes ^ regardless of whether they are regulated or not.  Aside from sensible rounding, none of our fares will rise by more than the formula."   Problem is ... that's simply not true; the Westbury to London TravelCard has risen from 80 pounds to 158 pounds, advanced fares that were previously avialable quite easily seem to have dried up, (and there are suggestions that as a result, prices charged have been trebled), and others report that their season ticket for 2013 travel is 15% up n price on what they paid for 2012 travel.   Of course, all this stuff is very hard to check because (a) there's no published list of quotas that I'm aware of on advanced tickets and (b) it's not possible to go online and look up last year's fares ...

You can, of course, understand the commercial desire to maximise income from the train services being operated; fares are said to be increasing to generate more income for investment, but at this late point in the current franchise in our area, I'm not terribly sure how the additional income that's raised will be channeled back by the train company into long term investment.  Perhaps that's why we see staff shortages rearing their head again. Perhspa that's why there seems to be a such a series of events, one after another, that prevent the scheduled service running - perhaps it's all being cut too fine, run too hard, to squeeze the last juice out of the system and customer?