London Banter - View Single Post - Heathrow Connect dropping to an hourly service on Sundays

Richard J.[_3_] · September 3rd 10, 11:06 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway

wrote on 03
September 2010 23:02:24 ...
On 3 Sep, 18:37, wrote:
On Sep 3, 2:31 pm, "Paul
wrote:

wrote in message

...

Likely to just be engineering alterations, the times (past the hour)
have also changed, there is also a reduction in some of the calls
(Southall loses one of its two stops per hour) of the Reading trains
after 12th September and retiming of some of the fast services. It
will be interesting to see if the Connect trains resume in the
December timetable.

I've just read elsewhere that whatever the works are for, Slough to
Paddington is down to 2 tracks on Sundays for the duration...

And under those circumstances, the Connect service will have the most
pathing issues due to fitting services onto the Stockley Park flyover.

Don't forget Heathrow Connect is now minus one EMU, so Siemens do not
have a maintenance spare that they used to have. The unit taken off
the Paddington service is now part of the "Express" fleet and confined
to the Terminal 4 shuttle.

I think you'll find that there is still a spare. Previously they had a
fleet of 5 trains and needed 4 to run the service. Each train would run
to T4, then do a shuttle trip to T123 and back, then return to Paddington.

They now have a dedicated Express-liveried CLass 360 for the shuttle.
The Connect trains now run only between T123 and Paddington and they can
do that with only 3 trains, leaving one spare as before.
--
Richard J.
(to email me, swap 'uk' and 'yon' in address)