If you are travelling to Brighton and are travelling light, the best way is to go via London though it will cost you a little more.

As for cancellations this past week (I include services which either terminated short of destination or started at a station further along the route when I say cancellations) there were quite a few, though I would excerise a bit of caution on being too critical because of the time of year with traincrew preferring to spend Christmas with their families rather than bail out FGW yet again with doing overtime.

What I would say though is that even with a reduced Saturday service in operation this past week that it has been disapointing to see the number of services that were cancelled.

This would not have given a positive customer experience for those who don't use travel by rail much and decided to let the train take the strain over the festive period and found that it wasnt running.

Does anyone know how cancelled trains are calculated in the performance figures. For example, if a Cardiff to Taunton train is cancelled from Bristol to Taunton but runs the first leg, is that a cancellation or not? Or are they treated as two completely separate legs. How these figures are derived will make a big difference to the results, as an awful lot of services are being cancelled for part of the journey only.

I'm also running a current monitor for a short period at http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/running.php on which I quote some figures for the number of services scheduled over FGW as a whole.