Jimm rather than getting your knickers in a twist i was referring to Friday not Saturday and referring to a time of day where there will be no additional trains come December as it's already half hourly at that point.
And frankly people doing a 3 to 5 hour journey on a train from the south west to London probably do count for a bit more than those doing a short hop on the Cotswold line
Says the person who gets their knickers in a twist about any and every incident that 'proves' why it is necessary to provide a 640-seat train on any London service operating west of Plymouth all day, every day, all year round, even when there are nothing like that number of people travelling all day, every day, all year round.
If the rest of us behaved like you, then I or someone else from this neck of the woods would have been posting/moaning on here quick as a flash on Friday evening when the 17.22 from Paddington to Hereford left Oxford with something like 700 people on board - and citing this as evidence that there should be nine-car IETs all day, every day, all year on the Cotswold Line.
But I'm not going to, because I am honest enough to recognise that there are parts of the day/week/year when the trains on the Oxford and Cotswold Line services - which are not going to be half-hourly all day past Oxford any time soon - do not need to transport around vast numbers of empty seats.
And what actually happened on Friday what that there was no guard to take the preceding 16.22 from Paddington on to Great Malvern, so it ran ecs to Worcester and the passengers had to wait 50 minutes to join an already busy service to get home - there would have been more passengers across the two trains on a Friday evening before a bank holiday but, as usual, when this sort of thing happens, a fair number of those planning to leave Oxford on the first train will have caught a bus instead.
Frankly it is time for you to drop the silly 'short hop' stuff. London to Worcester takes the same time as London to Exeter and London to Hereford is on a par with London to Plymouth.