Don^t use our rush hour trains

[whole diary]

[Timmer]

Doesn't matter what FGW^▸ (First Great Western) tries to do on the PR^▸ (Public Relations) front it always seem to blow up in their face. Their leafleting of Bristol commuters, which was a sensible idea if you look at the logic of it, has backfired and has reached the national press with a short report in today's Sun

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article559199.ece

But at the end of the day FGW only have themselves to blame for all this by saying to DaFT^» (Department for Transport - critical sounding abbreviation I discourage - about) at the franchise tendering process that they could do without 10/12/14 or however many 158 units have now left the franchise. Why didn't they check the passenger loadings that were happening under the Wessex franchise? They didnt make some of their fleet of 158s three cars for no reason.

[devon_metro]

As usual the press is clueless!

[Lee]

But at the end of the day FGW^▸ (First Great Western) only have themselves to blame for all this by saying to DaFT^» (Department for Transport - critical sounding abbreviation I discourage - about) at the franchise tendering process that they could do without 10/12/14 or however many 158 units have now left the franchise. Why didn't they check the passenger loadings that were happening under the Wessex franchise? They didnt make some of their fleet of 158s three cars for no reason.

Quote from Andrew Griffiths (11 September 2006 , page 3 of the link below.)
http://www.wellho.net/wccfoi/wccfgw1b.pdf

Please find attached (for internal use only please, as it is only draft) an indication of the number of coaches on
each of the FGW West services from December 2006. The revision shows the impact that having two extra
2-coach cl.158 sets and splitting two 3-coach cl.158s into three 2-coach sets has had. The main benefits are
not only capacity on key services but also performance (avoidance of cancellations, standbys at strategic
locations, fleet cycling etc). This plan is based on a detailed comparison of current loadings mapped onto the
new service pattern - and is a vast improvement on what was originally proposed. There will still be some
very busy trains, but I am pressing for better use of the HSTs^▸ (High Speed Train) in the evening peak on Bristol - Weston from
May. From December 2007 the aim is to also to use them to call at Worle, Keynsham and Oldfield Park in the
peaks, and the prospects for Turbo use are potentially more extensive than I had originally hoped.
Thankyou for your patience, and all your suggestions for service changes, which I have collated and am
proposing for implementation from May if possible. For December my aspiration is for a much improved
clockface pattern of departures from Bristol - I will keep you posted on progress!

[Timmer]

And we've all witnessed what a complete disaster it has been returning the 158s back to two coaches so that FGW^▸ (First Great Western) can save money by letting a number of 158s go off lease.

It wasn't as if back at the beginning of 2006 that no one said that what happened last December wouldn't take place because it was obvious that services were already busy under the Wessex arrangement of making some of their fleet of 158s 3 car trains. I had heard rumours that FGW were planning to return all their 158s back to two cars in the run up to the December 06 TT change, but didn't believe that they would actually go through with it knowing how busy services are on the Cardiff-Portsmouth line.

What I find all the more interesting is how confident FGW were in their 'new' December 2006 timetable and here we are a year later going back back to a similar timetable that was previously operated by Wessex Trains for many years.

I will say again though that I do agree with FGW's policy of encouraging passengers to use HST^▸ (High Speed Train) services when travelling to places like Bath and Weston-super-Mare so local services can serve stations in between not served by fast HST services but not so FGW can run shorter trains.