Post by d405Post by Dean AdamsLook forward
to SWT bringing on the other two services on 11 December as well.
Can you elaborate on the "other two services"?
I went to a West Wiltshire rail user group meeting in Bradford (on Avon)
last week - they had SWT managing director talking on several things,
including the new Bristol trains. By the time questions were invited
from the floor, the room was very short of oxygen, thankfully windows
were opened, but the following may well be only mildly accurate. :-)
It was revealing - basically the Waterloo service, being another bright
idea from Chris Gibb that worked, wasn't in anyone's passenger service
obligation. The trains turned into a real embarrassment when in
rearranging Waterloo, the SRA wanted to kill them, and then found that,
awkwardly for everyone, demand was buoyant, especially east of Bristol.
Also, of course, those trains went to *London* ...
When when news of their demise escaped, letters started to land on
everyone's desks, 3000 signature petitions started flying about even
from West Wiltshire: so the SRA bowed to political pressure and
requested that SWT look at the service and make some proposals.
SWT looked at it, liked what they saw, and came up with a number of
options, including several that exceeded what was then on offer.
However, the SRA, now even more cash-strapped, bit at the very minimum
cost option, for which SWT still needed a train or two - the SRA said
that they'd transfer some trains from Midland Mainline in support.
Well, that's not happened ... and SWT has had to find a train to provide
the less than bare minimum replacement that it's put in place. Moreover,
the contractual framework that backs the service is still rather
vapourous, having been completely non-existant as late as April this year.
I think the MD said that SWT have found its single train,
basically by taking advantage of better than expected maintenance
needs on some of its existing stuff, and is running a twice a day
service to Bristol till December, when it will either:
a)Cease it altogether - unlikely, as the existing one is already showing
signs of being popular, and more letters would fly, and they'd be asked
to continue.
b)Continue the service as it is for the time being.
c)Increase it in frequency to five a day - SWT's original minimum viable
plan, and they'd be keen to do this - but someone will need to find the
rolling stock, and it sounds as though the original stuff has gone to
Central Trains.
d)If there was the funding, they'd very much like to develop things in a
way in which Bristol would see about 9 trains a day to Waterloo with
some extended to Cardiff, too.
e)Also, rolling about on the deck is the RPCs' proposal for the Cardiff
route to the south coast - SWT might envisage meeting that with a
service pattern involving pairs of trains running together between
Cardiff and Salisbury, where they split, one half running to Waterloo
and the other to the coast.
The MD, somewhat impressed at the turnout his visit had produced pretty
much emphasised that further lobbying and letter writing in support of
the 'New' service would be a very good idea ...
He also spoke a little about how the Bristol service fits into the rest
of the SWT network, which led on to an outline of their timetable
changes for 2005, which involve half hourly clockface trains for
Salisbury, hourly clockface as far west as Yeovil Junction, and that
they'd take the opportunity to mend Salisbury. Oh, and a cunning colour
code for short, medium and long distance trains.
With regards to Salisbury, one of his assistants quite candidly stated
that many Salisbury connections had been deliberately broken some years
ago, as passengers from the Bristol direction were delaying London bound
trains on tight cross platform connections - and the single line
sections on the Exeter route were mentioned more than once as a real
obstacle to sane timetabling, and also that demand there was rather more
buoyant than can be met with the available line capacity - which isn't
right for timetabling anyway. The meeting eventually closed after
questions from the floor which left no doubt that the crap connections
at Salisbury had by no means gone unnoticed.
Suppressing the memory of the alarming pink train with a loco at each
end seen earlier on at Bradford, I walked to Avoncliff and its halt,
from where there was no sign of the planet Venus, fast approaching a
very inferior conjunction indeed, and where the last train of the day
still managed to attract two passengers.
The bare minimum offering put together at short notice from SWT is
enough to divert some of the political flak, but it's only a partial
replacement for the previous service, even if you don't live in Wales,
though SWT are motivated to extend them to Cardiff if they can find the
resources. There are the stops and end to end timings too. It's almost
as though planners for the original trains looked at the cross-London
times from Paddington and offered something which, at 2 hours 10 minutes
from say Bath to Waterloo, was close to being competitive in time to
Waterloo with the Paddington route from Bristol.
Hardly representative, but the spring bank holiday monday afternoon up
SWT train left Bath with 81 on board, lost eight or so and gained about
a dozen at Bradford.
Speaking of dozens, I must have made dozens of journeys on the Wales and
West services - I can still remember the high morale of the train crews
in the first year of operation, a sense that here was the privatised
railway doing the opposite of expectation and expanding the network,
offering new services that were immediately in demand, the staff were
either genuinely pleased with this or were good actors.
On my short outing on the SWT variety the other day, the staff seemed to
have been breathing the same air ...
Mark