West Coastway timetable tweaks

[swt_passenger]

Noticed yesterday that the 1426 SN service from Southampton to Brighton via Eastleigh (1Y25) has been slightly retimed. Until last week it nearly always got held just south of Fareham Tunnel, waiting for the 1434 (dep Soton) FGW Great Malvern to Brighton service (1O98) to run ahead of SN from Fareham to Brighton, the diversion via Eastleigh was apparently partially necessary to allow what was effectively an 'overtake' by FGW of the SN service.

As of this week though, the SN service leaves Southampton as before, but then stays ahead of the FGW service from Fareham all the way to Worthing, where it has a long station call (8 minutes) to allow the FGW service to overtake there and arrive at Brighton sooner. RTT suggests it is a permanent WTT feature.

I saw no advance notice of this, (presumably as it's so minor) but I guess it's possible that the SN service will now leave Southampton with more passengers aboard, as it will still be the quicker train as far as Worthing. Might affect the ORCATS shares slightly as well maybe?

 

[andy19_64]

The reason the Southern service now runs in front of the FGW service is due to the amount of times it got delayed due to the FGW Great Malvern service running late which sometimes meant that the Southern service would end up running fast to Brighton from Worthing to try and make up some time. It was decided to run the Southern service in front as far as Worthing and then put it into Platform 1 to wait for the FGW service and then if it was still not near they could then let the Southern service carry on.
Due to there being quite a lot of tweaks to the winter timetable the posters at stations only advertised the most important changes and advised customers to look at the timetables on the website for all changes.

 

[swt_passenger]

Thanks, that seems a very sensible reason, the FGW services have always seemed pretty unreliable in terms of timekeeping. I often used the service from Eastleigh to Fareham over the last 18 months or so, and more often than not we'd get to Fareham five or ten minutes down on schedule having waited in that cutting for the whole delay...