Recent content by jimm

No, it doesn't. Once a train has passed the home signal just to the west of Wolvercote North Junction, as it is now named, no other train can enter the section until the first train has entered the double track section at Charlbury.

166s were in regular use until 2017 on Oxford and Cotswold Line services (including, as noted above, runs to Hereford every bit as long as Cardiff-Portsmouth) despite not being up to the job long before that - yet some people posting on this forum apparently seem to think that there was no need...

Why can't you believe it? GWR's shortage of rolling stock is well known, as is the ditching of the plan to put 769s on Reading-Gatwick to release more Turbos to Bristol, that would have meant GWR might actually be able to reliably provide the five-car Turbo formations that are supposed to...

The odds are that Cotswold Line trains will run to and from Reading - this has been the practice for a long time now when there is no access to Paddington. It gives passengers to/from London the obvious option of changing at Oxford to/from Chiltern, which avoids mixing them up with other GWR...

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn't it? The order for Mk3 sleepers was placed in 1979, when there were a lot more overnight trains operating. The Timetable World site has the 1982-1983 Great Britain Timetable available, in which the section listing stations where you could use a sleeper...

Yes, off-peak services are still provided - and Shrewsbury had them back in the 1980s - in part because of the reason I noted about keeping the post-2019 timetable's hourly service between Paddington and Worcester balanced. If the couple of trains that go to Hereford off-peak did not do that...

You do realise that the early morning peak service from Hereford towards London has been reduced from three trains down to one, don't you? And four evening arrivals is now two. Hardly suggestive of great demand there either, is it? The survival of that one morning service to London probably has...

If the moderators would allow me just a tiny bit of leeway to clarify the question of formation lengths, the DfT's Intercity Express Programme specification for what became the 80x series of trains set a maximum permitted length for a formation at 312 metres - ie a 12-car formation of 26m...

There are some photos of 230001 taken by Martin Loader at Moreton-in-Marsh on Monday on his website http://www.hondawanderer.com/Recent_Additions.htm

Which really should not have come as a surprise, as that was the basis on which BR had reshaped the timetable when it replaced the dmus to/from Wolverhampton, plus a few extensions of London-Wolverhampton InterCity services to Shrewsbury. The switch to having 158s operating to/from Birmingham...

Sorry, but there is an area of land to the south side of the station at Hanborough, set aside by developer that built the new housing there, specifically for provision of more car parking spaces (I recall that 400 was the figure mentioned during the planning process), and a station building - or...

From the point at which this project began to take shape it was talked of in terms of attracting people heading to south Oxford and Cowley out of their cars, whether they were changing in Oxford or arriving on direct services from the Bicester direction coming off the Chiltern route or EWR, or...

Has it occurred to you that there might be demand TO South Oxford, from Bicester in particular, should trains on the branch be extensions of the Chiltern service? There are a lot of businesses in that part of Oxford, not just the BMW Mini plant and - big clue - the proposed stations would be...

The siding at the east side of the station is used six nights a week to stable a GWR IET that works the early morning service to Paddington. Prior to the introduction of IETs, an HST was stabled there from 2008, when FGW had the shore line equipment repaired following a series of cases when...

Thanks - I thought that was the case.