Just DM'd you, Worcester Passenger!

 

Thanks!

 

I'm comfortable with your post appearing here, Worcester_Passenger. Your excellent research will no doubt provide very useful reference material in this ongoing discussion.

CfN. 

 
I'm hoping that posting on this 'new' topic on December 31 os OK.

Prompted by some comments in a recent edition of Modern Railways, I’ve been looking at scheduled and actual running times.  I’ve used the data from RTT for the Mondays-to-Fridays from November 3 to December 12, for the section of the Cotswold line between Ascott and Evesham. These timings are only to the nearest minute at each location.

I looked at trains that do the ‘standard’ calls, at Kingham, Moreton and Honeybourne, and I excluded the trains with ‘padding’ in their timings (mostly in the up direction in the late afternoon). The ‘standard’ working timetable timing for down trains (pass Ascott to arrive Evesham) is 30 or 30.5 minutes (the variation is down to the dwell time at Honeybourne); in the up direction (depart Evesham to pass Ascott) it is 30.5 or 31 minutes.

I excluded Friday November 14 – there was an issue about defective track between Evesham and Moreton.  I also excluded an occasion when the ‘halts’ train was cancelled (when the following train did these calls), and a couple of occasions when trains skipped stops to catch up with the timetable.

That left me with 476 timings in the down direction and 327 in the up direction.

I’ve plotted the results as cumulative distributions on the two attached charts.  In the down direction, the scheduled running time is 30.25 minutes, depending on the dwell time at Honeybourne. But the median actual running time (achieved by half of the trains) is 32.5 minutes.  And 25% of trains take 34 minutes or longer – some 12% slower than the timetable.
Only 26% of trains take 31 minutes or less.

The chart for the up direction is broadly similar – a scheduled average of 30.75 minutes, a median of 32.5 minutes, and 28% taking 34 minutes or longer.

What this is telling me is that the trains can’t keep up with the current timetable, and that it’s not all surprising to find them being turned short – down Hereford trains only getting as far as Malvern and so on.

The Cotswold line may well suffer badly in this regard – the standard calling pattern between Oxford and Worcester Shrub Hill (57 miles) has 8 intermediate stops, so the station-to-station distance averages out at 6.3 miles. Over that distance, acceleration is very important, and that will be badly affected by engines that are not working.

Unless Hitachi can get the engines working properly soon, an emergency timetable looks very likely.

 
extra stops are promised on some services....as an example. no one claimed a full rewrite

 

Sounds more of a few tweaks to diagrams to release two sets for longer on depot rather then a whole timetable change.

 
As we were already up to page 23 of pages of posts on the previous topic (at https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=24934.0 ), I have now started yet another topic here - hopefully, to keep the discussion into more manageable chunks, in the interests of clarity and ease of future reference.

Hope this helps.  CfN. 

 
GWR don’t appear as yet to have published a list of altered services or maybe they are only rolling stock changes?

 

Chime Whistle Publishing has retweeted his claim about this timetable change, saying yesterday -

 
This was posted by Plymouth based train driver ‘irish_mail’ on RailUK Forums:
https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/iet-availability.293921/


On another thread it was raised about an unreliable source vs a reliable source. I do tend to find irish_rail’s posts fairly well informed, but take this as you find it. As ever, time will tell.

 
Chime Whistle Publishing tweeted earlier and here and here


I can not find any further detail yet, but GWR will have to load them fairly soon. Eyes peeled, folks.