Southampton - Westbury Shuttle Service Cancellations (26/09/2007)

[whole diary]

[Lee]

From the FGW^▸ (First Great Western) website :

12:32 Southampton Central to Westbury due 13:39
This train has been cancelled. This is due to a train fault.

11:06 Westbury to Southampton Central due 12:18
This train has been cancelled. This is due to a train fault.

12:22 Portsmouth Harbour to Cardiff Central due 15:42
This train has been revised. It will additionally call at: Dunbridge, Dean and Dilton Marsh. This is due to an earlier train fault.

[paulsouthwales]

ok, so have we got an official winter timetable for the transwilts yet?  if the tt are available 12 weeks before a change (as NRES^▸ (National Rail Enquiry Service) looks like having that info), we should have at least the first two weeks of the dec 2007 online now!

[grahame]

ok, so have we got an official winter timetable for the transwilts yet?  if the tt are available 12 weeks before a change (as NRES^▸ (National Rail Enquiry Service) looks like having that info), we should have at least the first two weeks of the dec 2007 online now!

Not "Official" ... but we know knoe that the service is hardly changed during the week - at 07:00 and 19:35 from Westbury and 06:19 and 18:42 from Swindon, give or take a couple of minutes.  The three EXTRA trains that were being worked on - from Salisbury at 07:40 (Swindon 08:50), Salisbury 11:31 (Swindon 12:40) and Salisbury 14:31 (Swindon 15:40) were pulled from the draft timetable in late May, and the class 153 unit that was going to provide them is running extra Salisbury - Romsey - Southampton services all leaving within 12 minutes of one of the new South West Trains runs

Saturday - sorry - don't know but I think very little change.   Although there are times up on the NRES system, we are "bustituted" again in December on Saturdays.  As the buses are running at about the times the trains run at the moment ...

Sunday - it looks like we have an improvement although once again I've just seen bustitution for part of the way;  on the first Sunday we (at Melksham) have a train at about 17:21 to Chippenham, a train at 18:51 arriving from Chippenham, and a final tran up to Chippenham at 19:50.   Doing that from memory - I may be a few minutes either way.

We are very, very disappointed that an opportunity has been lost - a decent peak service into Swindon on Monday to Friday would have given a good boost to the latish 18:42 back as people's days would have been a sensible length, and the daytime runs would have done great things for Salisbury - Chippenham and Salisbury - Swindon, both of which are oft overlooked;  indeed, I have a copy of an FGW^▸ (First Great Western) paper that ONLY looked at traffic for Melksham with the new proposal and still it got somewhere.  At the same time, I am delighted with the Sunday evening Southbound train.  On one hand it's just one train a week, and easily provided as the first Northboound used to return empty anyway.  BUT it's a signal - it's FGW providing a service on the line over and about the SLC^▸ (Service Level Commitment, or possibly SLC Rail (a consultancy firm), depending on context) specification - i.e. on a commercial basis.  One swallow doesn't make a summer, but the longest journey starts with just a single step.