Happy Sunday - 68 full cancellations and a dozen short runs - almost all of them due to crew shortage.   GWR run - perhaps - 1200 services on a typical Sunday (?) - so I make it about 1 train in 15 (between 6 and 7%) not running properly.  Was it always like this, just that the stats are at hand these days to tell us?    Lots of service gone including multiple successive ones to places like Looe, with St Ives and Newquay and Falmouth all getting a dishonourable mention.   But then it's a Sunday, during school holidays, so the trains would have been quiet with no school traffic and no commuters, right  ?

 
And 40 formation changes ... including ...

14:30 London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads due 16:02
15:30 London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads due 17:05
16:30 London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads due 18:02

All reductions - 10 to 9, 9 to 5 and 9 to 5.   10 to 9 is really no different ... 9 to 5 is serious.  And why were GWR running some middle of the day Cardiff to Portsmouth services with just 2 carriages yesterday.  Rhetorical question perhaps, but some of the trains at Warminster (I  watched rather than used) looked distinctly unpleasant ... and I wonder how those headed towards South Wales might have coped (or not) and they probably picked up more that they dropped off at places like Trowbridge and Bradford-on-Avon before getting some relief at Bath Spa

 

Community Shield Final in Cardiff today (Arsenal v Man City), so suspect other services are being stripped back to provide as much capacity as possible.

As for the decimation of the Cornish branches (on a summer Sunday, utterly hopeless), one can only hope that the missing crews are BBQ-ing responsibly given the "tinder box" weather conditions.

 

Aaaaand he's off!   

 

..................but not to Looe or St Ives!