Strangely, it seems to have disappeared from Real Time Trains altogether.

 
From Wikipedia:

 

Which got me wondering who St Pancras was / is ...

 
With thanks for starting this topic, eightonedee, I've moved it to this board, rather than our 'entirely overseas' board.

I'll also quote some detail from that BBC article:

 

You'd have to factor in the costs of endless strikes too once the Unions got wind it was going to happen.

 
This topic has been moved to The Wider Picture in the United Kingdom.

https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=29934.0

 

There are other hints at the tightness - such as the suspension of the Bristol - Oxford Saturday trial in the summer while an IET is going to Newquay.  As the new^(*) 175 units enter service, it will be very interesting^(*) to see whether / how much they are used to relieve the tension on the IET fleet, how much they are used to relieve the tension on other fleets such as the 158s, and how much they are used to displace the other very oldest trans on the fleet rather than adding any extra robustness into the fleet.

 
That answer is public - held within the contract for IETs by GWR. There is a specified number of units on standby to cover failed units, and I can't remember the number  but I recall that they are in low single digit numbers per day,

 
It would be very interesting to know what suggested availability of these IEP units was, at the time of acquisition, compared to what is achieved.  It looks as if there is an extremely thin amount of cover for failed units.  In a lot of cases, it seems to me, no cover at all.  A breakdown means a cancelled diagram, and that's that.  And to hell with the passengers' plans

 
Later:

The 18:02 is formed of the stock of this morning's failed 08:56.

 
OK - I think I have something in place to turn away the distributed spamspiders without interfering with members and guests.

Here is how busy the worker machine has been - overloading during the night, but with my tweaks doing better


And here is the day by day relentless rise.   Days end at 03:30, so only part of the traffic from last night is yet seen - I expect it to look the same when I look tomorrow morning, but hope to see it eased off by Sunday.

 
Not sure if this is the correct board, but this has cheered me up considerably-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5d6l5lz4jo

 
Living a bit further up the Thames, I think the answer is "no", but with a qualification.

We have a community bus (actually some elderly minibuses that look like they started life as semi-ambulances) run by a public spirited local person with volunteer drivers, and it is promoted through our monthly community newspaper, the Goring Gap News.

Apart from that there's hardly anything. I'm vaguely aware that Oxford Bus run something called the River Rapid service between Oxford and Reading, but don't see any publicity locally. I had to go on-line to find out where the nearest Reading Buses service gets to (it's Upper Basildon). But here in Goring & Streatley we are lucky enough to have a half-hourly train service that gets us into the centre of Reading in about 12 minutes.

I very seldom use a bus locally - I think I have been on more in France in the last few years! I have used one in Didcot to get to and from the garage that services my car if they cannot offer a courtesy car, but go on-line to find out what is running - which to be fair seems quite a comprehensive network covering a lot of the Wantage/Abingdon/south of Oxford area that's not so well served by rail.

I think the reason for so little publicity is that those who run the services simply assume that we all look everything up on-line, which is actually probably correct. With the severe decline in local newspapers, and the increasingly fractured nature of social media, it must be hardly worth the effort to do anything else. Tough though if you are elderly and not on-line.

 
Ian visits reports on some figures from the Mayor of London on TfL report reveals the cost and challenges of introducing driverless tube trains
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/tfl-report-reveals-the-cost-and-challenges-of-introducing-driverless-tube-trains-79316/


Which raises the old question Ooose gonna pay?

 

A cancellation in all but name for most who would have wished to join this train

 
Getting requests at up to ten per second and because our worker is seeing them all from the receptionist these days, it's a bit different to seeing where they'e coming from than it was when they came in direct. Working on it / think I have a fix in place - just testing.

 

I guess it is known, but I still get taken to another page when I click the "like" tab, then have to press the back key to return to the forum

Oddly when I click "reply" which I tried to do here, I get this message
https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/light.html

 

I've had the following message when viewing threads a couple of times this morning and the same thing a couple of days ago.

"A quick answer from our receptionist
The "Coffee Shop" is a popular and busy forum, and you have been calling for a lot of complex pages in a very short time. Are you real? If you are, and you keep getting this message, please get in touch with the admin team (address below)."

 
I'm guessing that subsidised routes in particular don't get promoted. The funding authority will only see it as their role to make sure a service is provided to meet proven need rather than encouraging extra travel, and the operator won't be interested as they're getting paid anyway. 
Cynically I'd say that on occasion the local authority may deliberately keep awareness as low as possible in the hope that low usage will demonstrate that the service isn't needed and the subsidy can be dropped.  I've certainly come across cases where the only timetables on the ground have been put up by local residents worried that no-one knows the bus runs so it isn't getting used.

 
BBC Breakfast marking the anniversary with quite a lengthy article this morning from London focussing on the London- Bristol service - passengers stating more reliable, comfortable and much cheaper than the alternatives although generally somewhat slower....here's another article marking it.........

https://www.route-one.net/features/a-celebration-of-100-years-of-scheduled-coach-services/

 

Busiest train of the day ... no alternative suggested except "get your money back and have a free journey on the next train" as it's over an hour later.  Why chose this train to cancel if you're short of crew?

 
Clearly not telling public the truth.

Train is announced as terminating early at Westbury (but the alleged fault allows it to continue from time of announcement through to Westbury, so if it could continue that far, could have got to Southampton).

Train is miraculously fixed at Westbury, and can be used to form another service missing a train. 

2V58 the return train from Southampton is showing as cancelled for reason M8 (problem with the train), ie it's not available, although codes YR or YU (tactical unit swaps) sound more likely

 
16:23 Westbury to Swindon due 17:05
16:23 Westbury to Swindon due 17:05 will be cancelled.
This is due to a shortage of train crew.

17:35 Swindon to Westbury due 18:19
17:35 Swindon to Westbury due 18:19 will be cancelled.
This is due to a shortage of train crew.

 

That is very odd indeed ...



So it was capped at Westbury due to a fault on the train, but then 5 minutes later conveniently able to form a train to Weymouth?   Yes - there is a fault on the train (no loos reported on the Weymouth train) but it very much looks to me that "this is due to a fault on this train" is NOT why it didn't continue to Southampton - it was "hijacked" to form the Weymouth service.  Am I reading this wrong?   Are we being fed porkies?

 

 

Dealing with these issues - again - this morning.   You may notice some slower responses or even no response or being turned away while I find out what's been going on overnight.

 
And again ....

 

With modern rolling stock the train maintenance teams know exactly where every coach is at any time, all rolling stock is tracked using GPS, can feed back live data or the data is downloaded as it enters a depot.  Maintenance records will hold serial numbers of all key components when last inspected, due for replacement .............. so an AED not a problem. 

Not forgetting the good old fashioned planned preventative maintenance using visual inspection

 
Delays to services between Slough and Reading

Due to a points failure between Slough and Reading some lines are blocked.

Train services running to and from these stations may be delayed by up to 15 minutes. Disruption is expected until 10:00 21/02.

Customer Advice
We are sorry for the delay to your journey today.


Can you tell me more about the incident?
A set of points on one of the lines between Slough and Reading has failed.

 

It's more complicated than that. The big problem for larger schemes is the considerable up-front costs of applying for, then obtaining planning permission, and that there's no guarantee that a permission will be granted. If the landowner is (very) wealthy, they might do it themselves. Often landowners will get no further than promoting their land for designation in the Local Plan for the area as a site to be designated for development, and then seek some kind of agreement with a developer under which the developer agrees to fund and pursue the planning application itself, and either agrees to buy the land conditional upon obtaining the permission within an agreed time limit, or is given the option to buy at something of a discount to reflect the fact that they have put in investment at risk in pursuing a planning application. Quite often the developer will take its agreement at the stage that sites are being selected in the Local Plan, as this process can be protracted and expensive as the plan has to be examined by a planning inspector, for example if the plan is subject to challenge through the courts, or if there are competing sites being put forward and the authority or inspector has to choose between them.

In the last couple of decades a new type of player in the market has emerged. These are land promoters. They use risk capital to promote sites through the local plan and planning application process, and if the whole process is successful, the site is sold and they get a share of the sale price as their reward. This has provided a supply of sites available to build, without the actual builder/developer having to tie up risk capital in promoting the land through these processes with no guarantee of success. The large national housebuilders have different overall business strategies as to how much they invest in what is known as strategic land, and how much they prefer instead to buy (to use the industry term) "oven-ready" sites.

If you are a promoter or well advised landowner going the whole hog and getting a planning permission, you would be well advised to get an outline permission and sell with the benefit of this. Each developer has its own idea of what will sell, its corporate style image and (in most cases) standard house-types that it will want to use, so in most greenfield sites it is a waste of money to approval of the details before a sale. There's a little risk left though at the outline planning stage, as it can take a long time to get those reserved matters approvals needed to start on site.



Correct - this was shortened from 5 years by the Blair regime, just in time for the 2008 crash, which meant that there were a number of sites with no buyers, or buyers with no cash to implement with time running against them. However, all you need do in that time is implement the permission - take  some initial step such as cutting some foundations, to keep the permission alive if you have cleared off all the pre-start conditions and obtained the reserved matters approvals.

But if you have invested all that resource in obtaining the planning and approvals and buying the land, that money is burning a hole in your pocket, so you have every commercial incentive to build and sell at a price and rate the market will bear to get your money back. Closing a site for a volume housebuilder is very much a last resort, not least because re-opening it incurs further expense.

The Paignton scheme is interesting. I see it's a mixed scheme of retail, industrial and warehousing that was granted outline permission in 2016 pursuant to a 2014 application on a major redundant office site. From the planning history it looks like quite a bit of the other elements have been built. The permission seems to have been obtained by a not very substantial company. The residential elements are still up for sale as far as I can see. I assume that approval of reserved matters for a full (in theory) ready-to-build scheme has been obtained to keep the permission alive for the residential part of the scheme. There must be something that has put off the any housebuilding company from buying - it could be any one of a number of things - the party promoting the scheme may have designed something that no-one can make work financially in the local market, the presence of an adjoining busy retail/commercial site might hit sales values, or their due diligence has disclosed technical problems that has scared off buyers.

As the permission in the 2016 permission has been implemented, it is still a live permission, but it's an unusual animal to still be there unbuilt. This is not a housebuilder sitting on a site, it's a landowner, promoter or commercial developer who cannot sell it for development. They might (of course) have already got the money they have spent buying and promoting the site back by building or selling the other elements.