"Lift shaft obscuring the signal" sounds like a phrase from those collections of text fragments that are assembled into a slightly coherent sentence and spat out as a rail transport service update - the update closing with that immortal tribute line to Minecraft: "All lines are blocked."

Mark

 
https://www.tvagwot.org.uk/reading-25-details

 
Full SWR service, Waterloo to Exeter being restored on 29 November

https://www.southwesternrailway.com/other/news-and-media/news/2025/november/woe-timetable-to-be-reinstated

 
I had one from Southern Vectis  ( late 80s?) which had a most amusing front and back cover.

The front cover showed a bucolic country scene with an old country farmer in a bus shelter with a printed timetable. An old lady is cycling in the mello mists of an Autumn morning, to church and the cows are grazing contentedly in the fields.

The back cover shows the bus shelter partially demolished, the old lady in the road, bike wheel spinning, the farmer dazed and winded, the cows upside down in the field ....all because a lightning bolt from the clouds is saying 'the next bus to.......and there were references to a digital scrolling display on it somehere....


Prophetic or what ?

Nowadays , you are only likely to get those reactions when the bus actually turns up.....

 
From BBC news

Published
4 November 2025, 10:53 GMT
Updated 8 minutes ago
A rail worker credited with saving multiple lives during a mass stabbing on a train has been named as Samir Zitouni.

The 48-year-old's actions on the Doncaster to London King's Cross service on Saturday evening were described as "nothing short of heroic".

Mr Zitouni remains "critically unwell" but stable in hospital, British Transport Police said.

Anthony Williams, 32, from Peterborough, was charged on Monday with 10 counts of attempted murder.

Ten people on board the LNER train, which stopped at Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, were taken to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge.

An eleventh person went to the hospital later.

Six of those have been discharged, four remain in a stable condition.

 
Lift shaft obscuring the signal…

 

Not cancelled then - "updated" 

 

I rearely even consider the Cotswold line services when I travel to London on business.  It's nominally an hourly service, but the days when all the trains run are few.  The thought of cancellation (or amendment to stop short of destination, which is somehow called an amendment, not a cancellation) just puts me off.  "More (newish) trains needing repair"  "shortage of traincrew"  "congestion"  "a fault on this train".  It's just hopeless for anyone with a busy schedule

So it's usually a Chiltern service from Warwick or Oxford for me, and a car journey to get to the station and back

 

Good explanation ... but does not answer "how will this be fixed", Chris.    However - we are not even asking for them to exceed the service level specified - we're asking them to deliver it.  I just looked up the last 12 weeks on ontimetrains for my local station - across all 7 days of the week - and rolled over the biggest black cancellation mark which is 4pm to 5pm - 20% cancellations.



"Never mind - catch the next train"?   Err - no - nothing in the next hour.

Edit to add ... P.S. Horrid thought, ChrisB - does the "service level" specified include any reliability factor - how many services should run?   Is 20% cancellations in the busiest time of day / late afternoon early evening within the bounds of what GWR and the DfT have agreed?   If so - I wish they would tell us that and we could then start a political campaign for better. 

 

I rearely even consider the Cotswold line services when I travel to London on business.  It's nominally an hourly service, but the days when all the trains run are few.  The thought of cancellation (or amendment to stop short of destination, which is somehow called an amendment, not a cancellation) just puts me off.  "More (newish) trains needing repair"  "shortage of traincrew"  "congestion"  "a fault on this train".  It's just hopeless for anyone with a busy schedule

So it's usually a Chiltern service from Warwick or Oxford for me, and a car journey to get to the station and back

 

No - because it doesn't work.    With a noble headline of running a financially tight ship, numbers of staff are kept to a minimum. There are enough to run the service when all the staff are well, fully trained (and never leave), not on vacation, and not out of place because of engineering works or other disruptions, and willing to work a modicum of overtime.   And the numbers are squeezed by arranging quite complex diagrams in which trains are kept running all day (they don't have personal needs breaks), but staff are dropped back from one train to another or - worse - across onto another line. That means that when it goes wrong means the disruption spreads like a disease that takes a long time to cure.  Many is the time I have read "disruption until 11:00" but yet found that passenger journeys into the middle of the afternoon are not being made as they should be.

The marketing headline is a noble one.  But I wonder if the approach actually is financially prudent. So many times, we see / hear of delay/repay which is an immediate loss of income that should be money kept to pay the crew that the railway doesn't have.  I see / hear of rail replacement buses which employ drivers and aren't always available. That gets worse when taxis or clusters of taxis are needed - more road drivers again. The feeling is that a single missing train driver results in multiple other drivers being used.  It's a nonsense.  It's also a nonsense in the longer term. Public Transport that is supposed to run but often (more than 2% of the time) does not discourages people from using it. You end up with not one a failure to sell on the day, but also a failure to market for future occasions, which is long standing damage.

I am going to suggest to you that the train operators are perfectly well aware that they are running a tight ship which relies (or tries to) on the goodwill of staff working overtime beyond what those staff want to do. It overlooks the over-complex staff rostering which makes for passenger chaos that results from the number of staff available being below those that are needed to run the service on many / most days.  I suspect it means that more staff have to be employed in control / rearranging things. It means that staff on the round who come into contact with the public as representatives of the train operating company and rail industry have to routinely deal with some pretty upset people who at times can get nasty.  "We will not tolerate abuse to our staff" say signs, yet at the same time, do not the train operators abuse their customers by knowingly failing to provide what they are contracted to provide?

GWR employs a number of senior managers with golden tongues who are well used to explaining their position.  I was at such an online meeting 4 or 5 weeks ago, at which several of the people who actually do the timetabling work and planning were wheeled out. They explained how they are adding a couple of minutes to expresses into Paddington in December that arrive at higher number platforms to get better on time performance.  They also noted a couple of other changes to help with staff rotas.   But when I asked about timetable planning for robust operation away from London, the senior manager shut me down and asked if we could take that offline; a promised follow up meeting has had to be requested multiple times and is still several weeks in the future.   We are, I'm afraid, still in the same situation as we were in in September last year - if anything it's worse, even though the reasons given last autumn are long since passed.

In summary - it has demonstrably not been working.  

Edit - correcting spelling and punctuation and splitting over-long sentences

 
This is WECA's artists's impression of the thing:

 
The DfT specifies a service level & an overall budget to be spent, and the operator then has to match one with the other to the best of their ability. This budget is shrinking now year-on-year, meaning that savings need to be found in order to continue matching available budget to service level. Next year's is lower still according to a friendly operator.

Of course, they can exceed the service level if they think additional income can be generated, and the DfT agrees. As previously mentioned above, the operator cannot exceed or reduce headcount by more than 5% without agreement.

Removing route-learning from depots of course means that those drivers can be employed in actual driving services, meaning short-term cost gains but not needing as much cover for doing that.....

 
Never heard of that, and what a candid graphic on the cover.

Mark

 

It also raises the ratio of full-fare adults to discounted students/school kids/OAPs

 
Incidentally, was it Church Road bridge that potentially needed to be rebuilt for electrification? If so, does anyone know if it's still considered necessary given the newer research around required clearances? Thanks

 

That's a lot to do in a short time for one person! Especially when adrenalin is flowing.
Thank you

 

I have never understood how this works, DfT sets a service level to be operated under the management contract.  Then basically seems to decide a number of staff to be employed even if it is insufficient contracted hours for the service they are financing.

I know in past decades when pay was lower, voluntary overtime was common, but we are in 2020s and concept that anyone would base a contract worth few hundred million pounds on hoping for a bit voluntary work doesn't compute.

Can someone please explain how this apparently works to me, because I cannot see any logic in this. Perhaps I am just being dumb.

 
It’s going to be a tight squeeze getting a lift in. Presumably the platform end signal will have to be shifted and the operational platform shifted back a bit towards Stapleton Road - it may not actually be necessary to bring any of the currently disused but back from the dead.

 
We took the bus into Bath the previous Saturday to catch a matinee at the theatre. When it picked us up in Whitley (2 miles down the road from Melksham) at about 12:40 it was already standing room only, and a number of potential passengers after that decided against boarding. A double decker would have been very welcome.

It didn't help that there was a local rugby derby on, Bath were hosting Bristol, which also meant that progress was very slow down Walcot Street due to all the cars queuing to get into the Waitrose car park.

I know there's at least one double decker that gets regular use between Bath and Melksham, the 17:15 from Bath, but I don't know about any others.

 
25 years ago today - 4th November 2000 - publication of final edition of the Great Britain Bus Timetable.



Fascinating to see how some of the services that were very thin have been lost completely, but others which weren't frequent are now much more frequent.

 

Noted - probably worth a split for the visibility benefit of both topics.

 

We are quite a big town.   On Sunday morning, I took the train with 41 other passengers when it left Melksham toward Swindon at 08:32. Yesterday morning, Lisa and I joined the bus into Bath at 07:35, and it was at the "oh my goodness" stage, shouts of "please move down the bus".  We (residents of Melksham) need and use both, and that will be all the more the case with future population growth.

Improvements are sought.  The train reliability sucks and that is damaging to put it mildly; I am amazed at how robust it has been but numbers are not as they should be and so many people tell me that they don't use public transport here "because".     The bus has been blossoming in use and we were disappointed / surprised that our service was just a single decker.

 
Bit of a thread drift here, mods !

 
To support grahame, in his clear frustration - from one of his posts elsewhere:


At the end of the last couple of my visits to Melksham, I decided to catch the bus, which goes from the end of grahame's driveway in Melksham to Bath Spa station - for just £3.

 
From the BBC:

 

There is a psychology in passenger use of public (rail) transport ... the higher up this list, the more likely people are to take the train.  And I would suspect that where a service frequency moves lots of people's planning from one category to another, it results in a sharp rise in passenger numbers.

1. Just turn up at the station to travel
2. Plan your day and make a minor adjustment to catch the best train
3. Work out your trains, then plan your day around them
4. Look at the trains to see if they work for you
5. Don't even thing about the train - be amazed if it runs at a useable time

 
My major concern is the use of Platform 3 at Truro for the St Austell bound services, faffing around with the footbridges at the station for passengers from Falmouth will be a hinderance. It's a shame there's no facility to switch eastwards of Truro from platform 2 to the upmain in the vicinity of the new switch that was installed with the new signalling to enabling of routing down services onto platform 3.

 
The entire South West so easily feels constrained in capacity and services. Makes me wonder what the optimum levels of both might be.

Mark

 

Given that both are 2 carriages, 30 trains a day Carlisle - Newcastle and 8 Carlisle to Leeds, it might be about the capacity as well as the speed, the S&C offers around 25% more train, though perhaps, the two options counted as one, not more seats.

(Taking an October last-train-of-the-day southbound Carlisle to Skipton the other year, and progress south of Kirby Stephen to the summit felt... stately, with a sort of 'Ok, lets do this again' vibe from the 158...).

Mark