Yes exactly, I agree. What's all the more frustrating about all this is that it doesn't feel like there is any real strategy
The specification for virtually all railway services in England effectively lies with Westminster, politicians there have more control than at any time in Railway history, so there’s nothing stopping them ripping up “franchise” agreements or insisting on new requirements (as long as they make appropriate payments for the additional subsidy required etc)
It’s just that, blessed with a level of powers that Nationalisation obsessives have always wanted Westminster to have, Westminster is either too scared to do much or too busy dealing with other issues, which is why so many of the old franchises are effectively kept on Life Support
If the whole thing was rejigged to make the connections work well at Bristol, and GWR had the resources to cope with the extra demand then I think that would be fine. But I fear that the moment they would just lop more services out the timetable without thinking about the wider consequences.
GWR don’t have the resources at the moment, agreed
Some franchises cut back parallel services when Operation Princess transformed the Cross Country network
FNW used to run from Manchester/Crewe/Stoke to Birmingham
Northern Spirit used to provide some fast daytime Leeds-Westgate-Sheffield services (some of which ran through to chesterfield)
I wouldn’t be surprised if GWR or Wales&West thinned out their Bristol-Devon services too, or Central Trains has to do similar in the Midlands
The point being, Princess was a convenient way of freeing up some stock that franchises could focus on their “core” routes, but this meant that those franchises couldn’t simply replace XC as their resources were tied up elsewhere
But the 800s that GWR run on their long distance routes are still a modern design, there’s nothing stopping the government writing a cheque to order a couple of dozen more*, so that GWR has enough fast trains to run an hourly New Street-Plymouth service (which would allow XC to cut their own forays into the south west back a bit, enough to give some viable daytime journeys from Manchester/Yorkshire to Devon, but not needing to run anything like as much as the half hourly that they used to try to provide)
All we need is someone to fund it, the companies will effectively do what the management contract tells them to do, any talk of “…but GWR don’t want to provide a service between…” is nonsense; GWR are there to implement the level of service that Westminster order them to
*- in the interests of pedantry, it wouldn’t be ordered under the original IET contract; only trains grown in the IET region get to be called 800s, anything else has to label itself as Sparkling Hitachi… maybe they’d have some minor cosmetic changes and have to be called 809s or something marginally different, but they could be any length you want and compatible with 800/802 for any multiple operations
