Richard J. wrote:
Peter Frimberley wrote:
On 17 Sep 2006 10:42:01 -0700, "Poldie" wrote:

Someone here must know this! When there's a problem at, say,
Langley, the trains between Slough and Paddington are stopped. If
you want to go from Ealing Broadway to Paddington then tough luck
- even though Ealing Broadway is nowhere near Langley (and
certainly miles from the 200 metre `exclusion zone` around today's
incident). What's wrong with running a temporary service which
would avoid days of inconvenience for people who, rather
unsuprisingly, have no interest in travelling anywhere near
Langley?

Not sure that the signalling and points will be set up to handle the
short shuttle you desire. I don't know, but it may be that the
trains have no easy way to turn round at Ealing and go back to
Paddington, remember the public is not allowed to be carried over
unusual routes these days, which can mean even a single set of
points if they never normally carry passengers, so a lot of
reversing manoevres may be impossible.

There's a bay platform at Hayes which could be used. Heathrow Connect
used that for its first week when there was a problem at Heathrow
preventing it reversing there. Incidentally, was Heathrow Connect still
running today? Was the Greenford service still running?

It's only for two days, I am sure the line was closed for a lot
longer when the big train crash happened, how did you cope then?

Irrelevant. The issue is whether a service can be run now to serve some
or all of the 9 stations at the London end of today's incident. Seems a
reasonable point to raise.
--
Richard J.
(to e-mail me, swap uk and yon in address)

*Pedantic mode* :-) Actually on Sunday, it would only be 4 stations as
the Greenford train doesn't run and Hanwell and Iver don't get a
service either. Heathrow connect was still running yesterday and FGW
apparently laid on a bus from Hayes to West Drayton, Langley and
Slough.

IIRC in you're interested, after the Ladbroke rail crash, Thames Trains
ran half - hourly 5 carriage trains stopping all stations from Reading
to Ealing Broadway. Very busy as I remember, some times you couldn't
get on at West Drayton going into town. Luckily for me, I only worked
in Hayes at the time. and started using the H50 which was cheaper and
about the same journey time to where I worked, so I stuck with the bus
after that...