SUPERFAST
It is hard to live up to expectations if you label a group of trains ‘Superfast’. Great Western Railway has used the title to describe its innovative extra trains from London to Bristol Temple Meads and Cardiff booked non-stop from Paddington to Bristol Parkway and vice versa. The distance to Parkway is 112miles with a typical gross schedule, for example that of the 12.45 from Paddington, being 69min at an average speed of 97mph.
We were originally promised two such trains an hour each way but delayed electrification and uncertainties over IET delivery, then reliability, resulted in a conservative approach to implementation with only partial introduction in December 2019 and the full complement being delayed until May 2020. Then Covid-19 intervened to ensure this did not happen.
Looking at the four-week performance ending in early March, provided by Railway Performance Society (RPS) magazine editor David Ashley, even this approach could not be judged to have been successful. Three months into the new arrangements only 25% of Superfasts arrived early, on time or within 59sec of right time. An appalling 17% were cancelled. However, the 67% ‘within 10min’ figure looks relatively respectable. Unimpressed? Well, I suppose it was 80% of the trains that actually ran!
With regard to the cancellation figure, if the service needs to be thinned out owing to Network Rail infrastructure failures, rolling stock availability, or other disruption then it makes sense to take out the Superfasts first. This might be counter-intuitive to railway staff brought up to safeguard prestige trains but times have changed and February/March 2020 had more than its fair share of storms with names.
Radical
My first attempts to sample the Great Western Railway non-stop trains between Paddington and Bristol Parkway in December 2019 had met with such cancellations.
Introducing a radical timetable in the teeth of the Christmas rush is an inevitable hostage to fortune. Perhaps, now that Brexit has taken place, we can stop conforming with pan-European railway strictures and start our winter timetable at a more suitable date than 10 days before the busiest public holiday of the year. After all, the French ski season, which the current changeover date is said to reflect,
