Paddington Cardiff timetabling

[Horizon22]

When timetable planning becomes too much for the timetable planners, then it's time to think about upgrading the network. Costly of course, but the alternative of waving the white flag and saying the railways cannot cope with any more traffic is not a good one.

The GWML has been quite comprehensively upgraded in the last decade. It is quite complex timetable planning, but you have rather trivialised the concept.

 

[Nicholas Lewis]

The GWML has been quite comprehensively upgraded in the last decade.

Very expensively upgraded to be correct yet the infrastructure and expensive trains aren't being exploited to their full potential.

The stopping patterns are perfectly sensible they just need to plan the timetable to SRT's the IETs can achieve.

 

[The Planner]

When timetable planning becomes too much for the timetable planners, then it's time to think about upgrading the network. Costly of course, but the alternative of waving the white flag and saying the railways cannot cope with any more traffic is not a good one.

That is what the "congested infrastructure" process is for when NR declare it. It effectively forces a re-write or another intervention such as infrastructure.

 

[Wilts Wanderer]

When timetable planning becomes too much for the timetable planners, then it's time to think about upgrading the network. Costly of course, but the alternative of waving the white flag and saying the railways cannot cope with any more traffic is not a good one.

I agree to an extent - however limited capacity has the benefit of creating a filtering effect that focusses the timetable on the most profitable & useful services. Until recently we’ve had a franchise bidding process that has rewarded service frequency and density without always taking marginal operating costs, maintenance and other overheads properly into account. I dread to think how unnecessarily crowded some routes would now be without the existing fixed bottlenecks constraining capacity!

In the time between the 70s, it has evolved that Reading, Swindon and Bristol Parkway are all much more important markets to London than Newport. Didcot too. And so it fills trains to have them. We have many more trains now too. I could see that if there was ever a third tph to South Wales, first stop BPW/Newport might be appealing. But the current frequency is needed for the other stations too - which need these as their main services.

Also crack expresses don't enable much seat churn - for example you might sell the same seat for London-Swindon and Swindon-Cardiff on a train. Which is a viable business stream on services with significant places en route (ECML has these intermediate places with outbound demand and churn, i.e. York and Newcastle, whereas WCML tends to be X to London and vv)

This is a very good point - and it’s now the case that where a new ‘fast service’ is proposed, it’s more about separating out key flows into their own service groups for optimal network design rather than achieving headline journey times. Using Swindon as an example, it’s no coincidence that the 0758 non-stop to Paddington pre-Covid was also the morning peak service with the lowest load factor on arrival in London, simply through skipping Reading (and the journey time gain for doing so was marginal at best due to catching the previous train up.)

== Doublepost prevention - post automatically merged: 19 Apr 2022 ==

Very expensively upgraded to be correct yet the infrastructure and expensive trains aren't being exploited to their full potential.

The stopping patterns are perfectly sensible they just need to plan the timetable to SRT's the IETs can achieve.

This is misinformed. If anything the IET SRTs themselves are on the tight side. There is a great difference between generous sectional timings, and paths that have slack in them due to the density of services planned. (The current timetable is not a particularly good indicator at present due to the number of retained paths that are unused due to Covid. It will be interesting to see if there is a ‘clear out’ of such slots going forward, as it is clear that many will not be used for the foreseeable, but requires the DfT to relieve TOCs of the obligation to keep bidding for them each timetabling cycle.

 

[Bald Rick]

The stopping patterns are perfectly sensible they just need to plan the timetable to SRT's the IETs can achieve.

they are.

 

[Bikeman78]

The peak superfasts started running but the half hourly off peak was supposed to begin in May 2020.

There were also to be some peak superfasts to South Wales which I don’t think ever started. First stop either Bristol Parkway or Newport, I can’t remember which.

Still hoping they might appear in the timetable again at some point. You can definitely make a case for them in the off peaks.

They did start running, at 1615, 1715 and 1815 if I recall correctly. First stop Bristol Parkway. A train to Cardiff Central followed at XX18 stopping at Reading, Swindon, Bristol Parkway and Newport. I meant to do the 1615 as it was off peak but I never got round to it.