Email from the Wilts & Berks Canal Trust https://wbct.org.uk/

 
.

13 amp sockets are often installed on the party wall separating rooms because it is cheaper, the same cable can serve outlets on both sides of the wall.
I change sheets once a week at home, and would expect the same in an hotel. In all but the very cheapest hotels sheets should be white, 100% cotton, and generously sized. NOT containing ANY poly-anything.
No i do not change towels every day at home.

 
The Grand Central Waterloo-Bristol rumour's now the subject of an article in Rail magazine. (Subscription required).

Mark

https://www.railmagazine.com/news/grand-central-planning-new-london-routes-from-manchester-and-bristol

 
This one did not fit neatly into any of our line boards - which rather confirms that it would be a useful new service.

There's. a photocall from our MP (Brian Mathew) and the mayor of Bradford-on-Avon (Sam Blackwell) who asks

 
South Western Railway (Or is that now Great British Railways | South Western) are re-doing their whole timetable for December 2027 and are looking for inputs from knowledgable parties (Stakeholders) to help inform them.

1. One of their (SWR / GBR|SW) current services runs from Salisbury to Waterloo Station in London, with calls / onward connections at Clapham Junction, Waterloo and Woking for trains to destinations in South London, Kent, Surrey and East Sussex

2. Great Western Railway (to become Great British Railways | Great Western in December) now run services on the "Bristol Metro" from Bristol as far as Salisbury, serving Bristol, Keynsham, Oldfield Park, Bath Spa, Freshford, Avoncliff, Bradford-on-Avon, Trowbridge, Westbury, Dilton Marsh, and Warminster along the way.

3. The SWR services are run using class 158 (and 159) trains, and the GWR services often are class 158 - they are run from a pool of class 158, 165 and 166 trains. SWR terminate in Salisbury's platforms from the east, and GWR services terminate - often at the same platforms - from the West.

4. My "Rumour Mill" suggests that Grand Central (an Arriva owned Open Access operator) have applied for rights to run a Waterloo, Salisbury, Warminster, Westbury, Trowbridge, Bradford on Avon, Bath Spa, Bristol Temple Meads service.  Which rather confirms a view in the industry that there is a demand for such a service worth backing up by serious investment, and that (under Open Access license terms) it is not "primarily abstractive" of traffic of other services, and that there is capacity for it.

5. The distance between London Waterloo and London Paddington where current Bristol and Bath to London services go is about 4 miles (6.4 km), putting them into different walking and cycling catchments.  London is a huge city and onward public transport from both is good, but underground and bus are daunting / difficult for many occasional passengers.

6. Suggestion - why not join up the Bristol -> Salisbury and the Salisbury -> Waterloo service from December 2027? Trains arriving in Salisbury from the west already join on to extra carriages before they continue to London, and 2 or 3 carriage trains of class 158/159 from Bristol (there are already a couple from Westbury) could do that, up as far as 8 or 9 carriage trains onwards

*** To be noted amongst the major benefits:
* A whole raft of popular new / restored service for which there is significant identified demand.
* Economic benefit of through London services from Keynsham, Oldfield Park, Bradford-on-Avon, Trowbridge and Dilton Marsh
* Operational improvement - efficiency at Salisbury
* An easy early win for Great British Railways

*** Previous services along the length of this corridor

Through services on this route ran preCovid and I summarised why they should remain - to no immediate avail - documented at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/16-reasons-continue-through-trains-london-graham-ellis/ and http://waterloo.savethetrain.org.uk (link is an old one - http not https!). Here are some updated / comments on issues at the time

* We had two operators under commercial contract from Bristol and Bath to London, and our dominant operator to Paddington wanted rid of the competition which undercut them, all be it with a less frequent and slower service.  They would now be complementary services

* As SWR and GWR were separate organisations, each needed their own drivers and route knowledge for the Bristol service for SWR crews was hard and expensive to maintain.  Under GBR, all staff are under the same banner and would be changed along the way.

* Train paths were being cleared for MetroWest between Bristol and Bath (Bathampton). Fair enough - those paths have been taken up by the MetroWest service which is the very service we are asking to link on to Waterloo. No problem any more

* HMG were looking to save money by thinning out services in the postCovid era.  But we are back up to 1.83 billion journeys a year (to March 2026) versus 0.99 billion journeys which was the latest data when the previous service was cut.  The strongest regrowth, you will note, is in the occasional traveller / leisure / personal business (such as students to/from Uni) markets which are the very market that this service will address.

 
From the BBC:

 
Melksham-Bristol commute not too bad - the Plan A 05:11 Gloucester-Southampton (to Trowbridge) was cancelled (train fault), but the plan B 06:35 Salisbury-Worcester (to Chippenham) was ok.

Then the 06:28 Paddington-Weston was delayed by 23 mins at Chippenham (speed restriction), but the official connection of the 07:00 Oxford-Bristol was only a minute late (07:48) so got to the office on time (for plan B).

I could claim for the plan A cancellation but not going to bother. I could/should have worked from home today, but I had to do that for the other 2 days I was supposed to be in the office this week (not due to weather), so felt I should show my face.

 
Pretty bad day for anyone needing to (rather than choosing to) travel

Graphic on front page currently has
Cancelled 225
Part route 97

Rare to be over 300

 
Stayed in many Travelodge hotels over the years,so these are my comments.

I think televisions MIGHT be on a timer(not sure if they are and how long it is)so the telly switches its self off after a certain time that it has been on.

Plastic water cups,glad they don't have these any more or even glass tumblers,we can use the china cups to have a drink.

Always put the kettle on the floor to have a hot drink which reduces the noise  level during the early hours of the morning.
Always take our own coffee,and what benefit do guests  get from taking the milk tumblers and also the sleeves of coffee and tea?

When hotels are being built and fitted out,13 amp plug sockets should be fitted to an outside wall,which reduces the "smack" from those 13 amp plugs next door.
Don't like carpets in the rooms,it can stink of literally any thing

If you are staying for a long time,how often should you have the sheets changed? how often do you change your sheets at home.

Do you change your towels at home every day

Rubbish bins,always take our rubbish into the reception area for disposal.

What I don't like is they allows dogs in any of their hotels.

Smoking can be an issue

Finally, toothpaste we always remember to take our tooth brush but forget the paste.,
just wish they would supply those small toothpaste tubes,but without those small temporary tooth brushes 

 

If you look at the timeline the Signaller would not have had sufficient time to do anything once 1H46 was in the auto signal area, even if the Signaller had picked up a handset to call 1H46 the crash would have happened; the Signaller see a track circuit block showing occupied a train can be anywhere in that block so they do not know exactly where a train is.  I do not know if there is ARS (automatic route setting) in the Bedford area, I'm not a signalling engineer, but once the path has been accepted by the Signaller the Signaller moves onto another signalling task, they may even have been talking to the driver of 1B67 about the AWS fault

RIAB may ask why 1H46 was crossed over onto the UP Main behind a failed 1B67, but in normal circumstance that is a performance issue and not a safety of trains issue.

 
...and unsurprisingly "This journey has been cancelled because of more trains than usual needing repairs at the same time".

 

Here to help is the map from my journey planner.  From Catanzano to Sibari we did a clockwise semicircle crossing from south to north coast and then back, rather than following the bulge via Crotone in a counterclockwise loop.   These maps suffer from crow-flying syndrome - direct lines shown between calling points even when the actual route is far from direct.

 
The 05:11 Gloucester - Southampton Central is 'delayed', or over 35 mins late if it sets off as I'm writing this.

 

The train did get somewhat busier and dragged into Brindisi around 45 minutes late.  A bit like a Cross Country or Cardiff - Portsmouth train, with end to end traffic (and I got off one stop short of Lecce) rare. 

I had warned my guest house I would be about an hour late, and had also allowed 30 minutes to find the place from the station but it only took 15.   Result in my standing outside pressing a call button that went to a phone and it did not answer.   There's a whole non-rail story in that.

Many, many places along the way - all the way from Melksham to Brindisi - worth further exploration. I wake up this morning of the first time single leading home knowing I am staying inn the same place for a second night - that I am not packing my bags and moving on by 11 (or 10) a.m.

 

From past reading an understanding, there is a cutoff and different system for trains cancelled/changed well in advance (48 hours?) and those which change shortly before they were due to run.  We've seen what I believe to be the effect of this on things like the closed-for-too-long Looe line where the first days made it to Journey Check and the feed we use for our disruption map, but then it became planned-further-ahead and did not flag in the short term changes.

Having a cutoff makes sense in that it avoids flooding the system at times of planned engineering works

I suspect that for this week, many changes were put into the system at or near the cutoff.

 
Thanks for that detailed and illustrated local update, Mark. 

 
The road reopened by 8pm and buses back to 'Normal for Bath'. An electrical fault beneath the pavement outside Bath's Guildhall had dumped enough energy to lift paving stones. Staff were awaiting the arrival of a technician to assist with a fix - there being eight cables beneath the pavement there. The fault might be a product of Monday afternoon's unbelievable weather event.

Mark

 
I'd thought that too. I would hope the final report will make clear that the 810's driver acted totally correctly.

On a separate point, the RAIB appear careful to say that the train passed a red signal, rather more neutral wording than referring to the driver passing it.  Not just semantics; the latter could be interpreted as assigning blame already when that is far from certain.

 
When were those thunderstorms?

 

I don't know if they get an alarm in the signalling centre, but I've been in an area where another train passed a signal at danger and the signallers sent me an emergency stop message. I suspect the RAIB will look at the workload of the signallers covering Bedford. 

 

The SPAD should have been noted by the signalling system (and thence, the signaller). Is there a standard protocol to be followed by the signaller in such a case?

 
Ahh, all explained why it is not raining at all in Somerset..

 
Its a good thing that this is fallow year for Glastonbury

 

When I was still at work I had a number of visits to the West Ealing / Greenford trial, the GWR team were confident that the system could handle any of the TV branches, the Maidenhead / Marlow would only require the charge at Maidenhead, the unit on the Borne End / Marlow peak shuttles would not require charging.


Agreed a new train set, greener and quitter would be a good marketing, especially if the half hourly Maidenhead / Marlow through service was introduced at the same time.

 
Reading the RAIB report, seems they have the video, as it on a separate recorder to the data.

 

That is one slice of the Swiss cheese a-driver mentioned.

The RAIB interim report states they were unable to access the OTDR of 1H46 until it had been lifted, the OTDR should have the information of the AWS and video images from the forward facing camera

 
It still wouldn't have had any effect if it hadn't come to a stop (which is being investigated)

 
I'm surprised that little mention has been made that 1B67 was almost 20 late at the time, apologies if I've missed it, that in my view has to have some contribution to the incident.

 
Excellent: and market the service as the 'Electric donkey'. The sparks effect will have passenger numbers growing strongly, and people will be like 'Hi, Sparkydonks, how're you doing? Compared to the old train you're as regular as a quartz clock.'

Mark

 

AWS could have contributed but ultimately its down to the driver to observe the signals and for some reason, he wasn't able to.  RAIB will find out why.  There's so many things that could have contributed,  it could be a classic case of the Swiss Cheese Effect, everything lined up to conspire against Sean.

I really feel for the driver of the 810 though. They're always going to be left wondering if they could have done something differently.  That's a hard thought to shift.