"West" Timetable Woes

[whole diary]

[Btline]

Ok, as I have alluded to in another thread, I am planning to explore the "Severn and Solent" area.

However, trying to plan what trains to catch is a nightmare. I've got three timetables open (one of which is a stupid mini timetable), with several sets of times for Sundays - WHICH DO NOT MATCH BETWEEN THE THREE! I am struggling to join services up, as I've got to guess and match up arrival/departure times at Temple Meads.

Thus I have given up and will use online journey planners to see the direct trains between Weymouth and Worcester. What are FGW^▸ (First Great Western) playing at? Do they want to attract passengers? I am perfectly able to read a Train timetable - many people are not, so how are they meant to cope?

I always moaned about Pocket Timetable E when is was out - but at least it said where each train started from and ended at, to make longer distance planning easier. The current setup is ridiculous, and the different timetables don't match.

So now I've got to waste time staring at a screen to solve the problem and then write everything down/ waste ink and paper printing it out. When I could highlight relevant services/pages and then be able to look up last minute changes if I need to!

Last year I explored the South East Coast - Southern's timetables were a joy in comparison - showing all services and their destinations, in a simple, non ambiguous way - and that's with the complexity of train splitting, and there being several routes to Lewes!

Urgh!

[inspector_blakey]

(a) Are you sure all the timetables open in front of you have the same date on them...?
(b) Are we talking the odd minute here and there or huge differences? Odd minutes could be accounted for by one timetable showing an arrival time at a particular station, and another showing the departure, for example.
(c) It's not altogether unknown for actual Sunday schedules to differ significant from printed timetables due to engineering work, so using an online journey planner is by far the safest way of finding out train times for a Sunday anyway!

[Btline]

Dates correct. We're talking about a 3 minute difference in the misprint - not the end of the world, but still bad. Have taken into account arrival/depature, and it's still wrong.

But that's neither here not there - it is the lack of compatibility between timetables for longer journeys (e.g. Worcester to Weymouth) that I'm really fed up with.

[JayMac]

Can't quite understand your point Btline. 

The direct Worcester to Weymouth services are all there in the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) Network timetable, and Timetable 27 .pdf from FGW's website.

There are no direct services on a Sunday from Worcester to Weymouth.

Can you tell us which timetables you are looking at and what station's times are misprinted?

[Btline]

In order to plan travelling around Worcester to Weymouth and Weston, I have to look at Booklets 22, 24 and 28 with no timetable covering the entire length of journey - this is annoying. In the old Pocket timetable E, the whole journey was shown in one table.

[inspector_blakey]

Good heavens Btline, all that froth over a single three-minute discrepancy in different timetables... It's not good for your health old boy