February Summary

Well, February was a marked improvement on January with only 1 serious delay. Quite an achievement, although I doubt that this will set a trend. My route will change from March onwards as I will be starting my trek from Maidenhead station as opposed to Wargrave. So we'll see how the new schedule works out.

February 25 - More seating!

Where are the hordes that usually crowd my mornings? Once again I got on the H&C train this morning to find it merely half full (or is it half empty?) and plenty of seating. Don't get me wrong this is not a complaint, just confusion. It's not the holiday season, there were no weather warnings, nor any notifications of immanent civil unrest.

February 24 - The ghost train

I was amazed when at the peak of the rush hour a completely empty train stopped at the Barbican. Nervously a few of us stepped on, but more remained on the platform doubting such an appearance could be real. The doors closed, leaving the doubters behind giving us all a seated journey.

February 10 - H&C Cattletrucks

The overcrowding that the commuter suffers would result in a public outcry were it applied to animals in transit. I have tried for many years to see a pattern to the congestion problem but have failed miserably. So today, train after train after train arrived full to danger levels. I sympathise with those poor women whose lack of height places their noses so squarely into the armpits of sweating men.

February 8 - email reply

Thank you for your email of 25 January 2011. I am sorry for the problems you had on your journeys with us from Wargrave and London Paddington on 17 and 21 January. Our 07:17 service arrived 49 minutes late at London Paddington due to an earlier signal problem on 17 January and on 21 January this service arrived 13 minutes late due to a points failure at Maidenhead. I apologise for the inconvenience these delays caused you.

The start of the last period was challenging for us with some frozen and icy conditions. Although we were pleased that we managed to maintain a service through this bad weather, some of our trains were delayed or cancelled. Our service has also been affected by 2 major disruptions recently - some bricks fell on the line from the Sapperton Tunnel and one of our High Speed Trains hit a herd of cows. Both of these things caused considerable delays throughout the day and badly affected our performance.

We are continuing to experience far too many signal and track problems and we are discussing this with Network Rail at a very senior level. Network Rail have put an action plan in place to resolve these problems and have also made some changes to their business helping them to deliver a better service to us and our customers. We will continue to support them with this and we are confident that the improvements they have made in the last few weeks will continue into the New Year.

Despite a recent overall improvement in performance, punctuality in the London and Thames Valley area is just not good enough at the moment. We are working really hard to bring it back to a level that our customers have every right to expect and I am sorry for the inconvenience you have been caused.

February 7 - Moorgate signal failure

Finding the Barbican tube station closed I walked to Moorgate, there to catch an H&C line train. This trundled quite happily to Edgware road where we were told that "This train terminates here". We all join the crowd on the Circle line and wait in intimate proximity. And we wait, resisting the temptation to get more intimate. The train then crawls its way to Paddington where I can just make the Frome connection, only to find out that "this train is out of service". So I finally get on the slow but faithful Henley train. Ironically had the Frome train managed its normally rapid journey to Twyford all would have been in vain as the connecting Henley train had also been taken out of service. Well done guys a real feat of organisation!

February 4 - Good news (sort of)

This morning, not only were both trains on time but there was actually seating available on the H&C line. I was so surprised I had to sit down. So Great Western tried hard to make up for it in the evening by slowing down at Slough just long enough to miss the Wargrave connection. But by some miracle the Henley train was late and so the combination of cock-ups cancelled each other out and all was well in the end.