They are what they are

 
Seeing the 6 and 7 bus service in Bath operated by an electric bus today - and also Flixbus provisioned with an electric coach on the (competitive in price but not timings) run up to London - and a portion of the cars (and bikes) on the road being electric - this was thought-provoking.

I'm put in mind of the nineteen fifties and a steam-operated rail system that was demanding of the people who worked in it, was in retrenchment, struggling to attract staff, running timetables that were sometimes obsolete and not a good fit with changing times, subject to wild swings in political interference, dependent on public subsidy having poured a lot of its strength into the war - with the public increasingly no longer looking to the railway for transport, turning to buses and, if they could, motor cars instead, given a big push at the time with the building of toll-free, free-at-the-point-of-use motorways - this despite the fact that many cars of the time weren't exactly brilliant (and many of said vehicles,  not engineered for continuous high speed cruising, were killed by those same motorways)**.

Long distance trips by train to holiday destinations became long distance trips by car, day or night: perhaps a child in the back seat tasked with care for another new device, the transistor radio, turning it as needed to maintain reception.

I'm wondering how much a similar impression might bite today, when the railway, particularly in the west, diesel-fuelled and operating long distance services using expensive and complex stock whose interior air quality was found at one point to be not particularly brilliant, while many other branch and inter-regional services are provisioned for the foreseeable with the externally very noisy likes of the class 166.

Also, part of the national picture is that HS2 has taken a swing at the future, but with the cuts to core pieces of its design, will not fulfil the primary task of capacity enhancement for the national network itself - without further changes, the role that HS2 could play has been to a large extent closed down - and its costs have risen.

Returning to the parts of the railway that are running on diesel, unreliable and unable to provision their timetables, is this industry in danger of imminently presenting as yesterdays mode of transport, running on yesterday's technology?

Thankfully the overall picture is (hopefully) more rosy, but I do wonder about the margins (and in some ways those margins, for the GWR, begin east of Chippenham, north of Didcot, west of Cardiff, south of Reading, and there doesn't seem to be a plan to change that, even though the rising cost (& fragility) of the oil-based economy is surely providing a spur.)

Mark

tl:dr - batteries won't do everything, where is the rolling programme of electrification that's clearly needed?

**A friend of a friend who drove... it was either an Austin Devon or Somerset... gave me a lift from Llanbadarn, Aberystwyth, up the road called Heol y Bont to Penparcau. The short trip was... an education, but those weren't cars to which people had great exposure. Many more people will recall what didn't happen very much when the brake pedal of, say, a Morris Minor, was depressed - not much, compared to current vehicles...

(The friend of a friend having dropped me off was heading to Lampeter - sometimes I wonder if he's there yet...)

 
175116  to Laira today. Delayed for 70 mins near Acton Wells but arrived 8 minutes early at Laira

Ely :3: 175005/008, 175104 (175008 is in two halves)

Wolverton :9 : 175004, 175102/103/105/106/107/108/109/110

Laira : 14: 175002/007/009, 175114 ex Ely; 175001/003/006/011, 175101/111/112/113/115/116 ex Wolverton

Long Rock : 1 : 175010 ex Ely

as of 28 May 2026

 
I didn’t.  However I did see it cross the river bridge at Staines last Friday but I had a pint in one hand and a handbag in the other at the time. (Don’t ask).

 
I did wonder whether bobm tried to coincide with 701006 on its daily visit. If you stand on the footbridge to get a clear view of the box, you see hardly any of the livery, just the end of the train which is almost a livery-free zone. From the ground you end up peering through a thicket of streetware. But you can still see one small step of premature "demolition" - someone has made off with the name sign of the front. Not NR, I suspect.

Incidentally, I'm assuming the scruffy shack (or relay room) behind the box will be going as well. It would be a shame to lose a decent bit of railway vernacular and leave that prominently on view.

 
Agreed that they haven't yelled from the rooftops about it, but we've discussed here in the forum the removal of late night/early morning services to thin out the service....

 
From the BBC:

 

ORR have issued new quarterly figures, and according to table 1.3 GWR has planned to cut 2% of services compared to previous year.

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/4pmhex4x/performance-stats-release-jan-mar-2026.pdf

So all the PR spin of increasing services to Newquay, and introducing Bristol-Oxford there is an overall cut (which has rather been kept under the radar)

 

Wiring from Didcot through to Hanborough has been mooted a few times over the years and is probably a better bet than Banbury.  Can't see the money being stumped up any time soon though!

Oxford Parkway is a kind of Oxford North station already.  Mind you, you can't really go north from it until East West Rail finally starts up, when connections at Milton Keynes will make sense for some journeys to the north.

 

Fair point on the re-instatement of through stopping services and given the battles Oxfordshire seem to be waging against the motorcar, surely there must be a reasonably good case for Oxford North and South stations too?

If that were the case then extending the wires and an Oxfordshire Metro to Banbury would seem very sensible and relatively inexpensive.

Of course the problem is that Labour are unlikely to want to be seen to be spending money on posh southerners ;-)

 

 
17:50 Gloucester to Salisbury due 20:06

17:50 Gloucester to Salisbury due 20:06 will be terminated at Westbury.
It will no longer call at Dilton Marsh, Warminster and Salisbury.

This is due to a fault with the signalling system.

 
My wife tells me she's been hearing how extensive the damage is to people's property (in Melksham, 2 miles from us), and it's Act of God so not covered by insurance. Someone has been given a £3k quote to remove 60 dents from their car's roof

 
Money to pay for it to happen vs legal requirement

 
The "road signs disappearing into the vegetation" problem seems worse than ever this year. Almost all signs at rural crossroads, and warning signs in rural areas seem to have been engulfed in West Berks, Oxon, Hampshire and West Sussex from recent travels in the last two weeks. While I support minimising mowing of verges for encouraging wildlife, I think that not keeping road signs clear is beginning to become a safety issue as well as an inconvenience for those trying to work out where they are. 

 

No, the real advantage would be restoring a proper stopping service all the way from Reading to Oxford, that we haven't had since the introduction of the split service necessitated by the abandonment of electrification beyond Didcot. The lack of direct trains from all stations between Tilehurst and Cholsey to Oxford, all relatively busy stations with reasonably large local populations and hinterlands, is just as much a gap in the GWR network as the recently remedied lack of direct Bristol - Oxford services. A number of our acquaintances in Goring and Streatley say that they have given up going to Oxford, either entirely or by public transport, as a result.

See also Marlburian's post early today. We might be a prosperous corner of the country between Reading and Oxford, but it doesn't help encouraging the use of public transport when something we used to take for granted has just disappeared with very little comment or outcry.

Thames Metro, now?

 
Wiltshire County Council have responded: they've assessed the issue, sent photos of the obstructing vegetation to the area staff, while agreeing that the approach signage needs to be a lot more visible. To quote: "... the signage concerns brought to the attention of the Area Highway Engineer and Technician."

Mark

 
For West Reading over the past few days there've been thunderstorm warnings with low percentage chances, but these have been progressively reduced.  This morning there was just a little evidence of a light overnight shower.

I wouldn't mind some steady overnight rain as my front lawn has almost recovered from last year's dry weather but I can see it becoming a disgrace again if we have another dry summer.


Meanwhile over in Kent there are problems with the water supply.

 
It was in Yate (and the site's now beneath housing). It came to my notice because the site is adjacent to a locally valued concrete footbridge across Kennedy Way there - Kennedy Way being the sort of 'Yate and Chipping Sodbury bypass' that in part evolved from the approach road to the depot.

(The concrete footbridge - crossing a dual carriageway - is about to become a little notorious as South Gloucestershire Council, uneasy about its condition, is intending to demolish it completely over the weekend of June 5th - 8th, with no intention to replace it - the people who formerly used it will be directed to other crossings about ten minutes walk away).

Mark

Archaeological record of Wapley Common Depot:

https://eprints.oxfordarchaeology.com/935/

The site, from NLS mapping:

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=15.1&lat=51.53522&lon=-2.41443&layers=258&b=ESRIWorld&o=100

 
The problem with hail is that the growth of hailstones isn't self-limiting in the same way as e.g. raindrops and the (vaguely controlled) upper size limit is on a completely different part of the weight-scale. The nature of the UK's weather has changed with conditions emerging that results in the likelihood of hailstorms delivering 'Unreasonable'-sized hailstones. This poses a challenge for anything that's not previously been tested in this way.

Mark

**Unreasonable from the point of view of e.g. a greenhouse, flat roof, car body, unprotected head etc etc.

 
Melksham News report https://melkshamnews.com/giant-hailstones-cause-damage-across-melksham/

 
We're just down the road in Whitley, and yes, it woke me up at about 1:50. But it was 'just' heavy rain I think and a pretty impressive light show. Only distant thunder; wouldn't like to have been in the middle of it. I left the house early this morning; my wife texted me to say she had heard about the hail from a friend in Melksham, and was going to go out and check the cars later. Certainly lots of greenery on the pavements as I got closer to the station.

 
On May 12 NHS Haematology told me that I needed an iron infusion. Remembering a long wait for one in 2023, I contacted a private hospital in Reading who offered  me an appointment with a consultant in mid-June with a view to an infusion in mid-July. So last Friday I emailed the Oxford Iron Clinic which uses facilities at the John Radcliffe Hospital in NE Oxford. I had a telephone consultation on Tuesday and the offer of an infusion this morning (Thursday).

I indulged in an excess of working out the best way to get there. Three years ago I'd taken the train to Didcot and then a bus direct to the hospital that took about 50 minutes through some boring industrial estates and then the centre of Oxford.

I even contemplated driving to the John Radcliffe, but its car-park can get very full, and I remembered my cousin, a former commander of a Royal Navy ship, collecting me from there three years ago.  "Why are we driving through Oxford," I asked (rather than joining the Eastern ring road) . "I took the wrong turning," he admitted.  And he was using Satnav, which eventually took us on a ridiculous route, including crossing over the Whitchurch toll-bridge (luckily he had a few coins with him). 

So I considered other routes, including parking in Dorchester-on-Thames and waiting at the bypass  for the Rapid Rivers X40 bus into Oxford (it starts in Reading and spends two hours winding its way through villages.)  Then I realised that it was half-term and that I could very reasonably park close to the school on the old main road in Crowmarsh Gifford and catch the X40 from a stop a hundred yards away.

An hour after I'd concluded that was my best and most pleasant option, a letter arrived from the NHS offering me an infusion on June 10 at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, served by a convenient bus route from Tilehurst. So I cancelled today's appointment and await a promised refund.

 

Looking at what happened to the Transwilts service last night, if you'd waited any longer you may well still be travelling now!

 
BTW I think they cleared that broken down freight train fairly promptly; it might have been better to stay at BTM and wait for the next 'normal' Melksham route via Bath instead of hopping on the diverted 17:29. Can't be bothered to check, might not like the answer

 
Depends on your definition of 'useful'...

Thanks - yes, got to Swindon in plenty of time, and caught the (late running) Taunton service to Chippenham in case the Westbury one was cancelled. It wasn't, although it did run about 10 mins late, so ended up at Melksham at 19:18, 78 mins later than the train I should have been on. It felt like longer

Will try the 17:12 Bristol-Oxford again this evening; fingers crossed...

 
I hope you got... somewhere useful yesterday evening.

Mark

 
27th May - Arnhem to Sankt Polten, changing at Augsburg and Salzburg.   Three International trains - the Amsterdam to Munich service, followed by the Stuttgart to Graz train (both DB operated) and the Innsbruck to Bratislava train, by RailJet. The Salzburg change was supposed to be just seven minutes but we had an extra quarter of and hour. Contrary to current reputation, DB were on time whereas RailJet had been held up somewhere.

Google tells me the distance is 991 kms

 

Don't know ... hoping to get a report  .   I went up to Devizes on the bus to see the film there, but it was "booked attendees only" and full, and I was turned away at the door, then last night's showing in Melksham was organised after the trip away I'm currently on.  The Melksham Environment Group had use of the huge Assembly Hall and I can't imagine there was a capacity issue here; traction on marketing was less than gripping, and the date chosen clashed with the Area Board which is required attendance for unitary councillors and other movers and shakers too.

 

Interestingly, the final train of the day appears to have run, but that is indeed a formal acknowledgement.  I would tend to ask if GWR has bitten off more than it can chew with the extra trains running Bristol - Oxford and Par - Newquay for the last 10 days, and is prioritising those.  However, there were cancellations on both of those services as well yesterday.

Rolling stock and heat issues are getting a lot of the blame with it being the "hottest May on record" but I do note that it's a May record and not a year-round record, so is that something of a more generic excuse that about trains not coping with the new UK weather patterns?

Rather off "Melksham" I got a phone call from Keynsham yesterday, where passengers had been waiting "an hour and a half" for a train and "could not get through to National Enquires".  Old people and babies waiting ... no information about what was happening ... trains flashing through non-stop but nothing calling.   It would appear that after the 14:11 called (at 14:20), the 14:49 was cancelled (though Real Time Trains was just showing nothing for it while this was ongoing) and then the 15:11 had failed to show as well - in turned out that it had got stuck at Temple Meads for 25 minutes and then skipped stations including Keynsham ... presumably to make up time ... the next train due at 15:52 did eventually call, more or less on time.   Good illustration of the lack of customer support / information that reaches people as things go wrong.

This morning ...