On the occasions when Paddington was not functioning, I have travelled to Andover from Waterloo instead of Paddinton to Bedwyn.  The SWT^▸ (South West Trains) trains were clean, on time, staffed by pleasant helpful people, in fact a treat to travel on.  A somewhat surreal experience.

Actually, we customers did once speculate that each train had a writer in residence to do precisily that ie make up excuses as to why we were delayed.  In one case after a 15 minute pause between Paddington and Slough we were told there was a failed frieght train at Slough (so cearly not FGW^▸ (First Great Western)'s fault as they didn't run freight) however as we passed through Slough some time later we could see the failed train which was as FGW Adelante, noted for their reliability.

can anybody explain to me why FGW^▸ (First Great Western) (or should it be LGW), which is actually a bus company, had its franchise renewed when it had one of the worse performance records on reliability and timelyness and now hold most of the top positions in the league of overcrowding?  Why are railservices run if not for the passengers?