Since we're all locked down due to the current pandemic, and I therefore can't indulge my hobby of going on trains for a fun weekend, I thought it might help everyone if I looked back at some of the many, many trips I've taken but never written about. So, welcome to the revival of my blog!
Today's trip is from seven years ago today: Friday 29th March 2013, which was Good Friday. Due to the massive remodelling of Reading station, First Great Western trains were subject to some incredible diversions — so some friends and I took a trip to Paignton and back to sample the diversions.
I think it's worth taking a moment to remember how transformational a project the Reading remodelling was: adding five new full-length platforms (while closing two short bay platforms), but more importantly grade-separating most of the conflicting movements to the west of the station with the incredible flyover structure installed.
For comparison, here's the 2009 track layout:
And the 2015 track layout:
Obviously to get from one to the other took a lot of work, and one big chunk of that was done over the four-day bank holiday weekend at Easter 2013, which saw Reading shut to all but a handful of trains. The main job at Easter 2013 was to open platforms 12-15 and to slue the Relief Lines (shown above in green) to the north to create the space to build the rest of the new layout to the west of the station.
However, with Reading shut, there's not an obvious way to get trains from the Westcountry and South Wales into London. But not running any trains would simply have left hundreds, maybe thousands of people trying to wait for dreaded rail replacement buses. This simply wasn't acceptable.
Instead, some very commendable long-term planning on the part of First Great Western and Network Rail ensured that an hourly service between London and each of Bristol, Cardiff and Plymouth could be maintained throughout the block, using a variety of fascinating diversionary routes, shown in the map below.
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Both routes were incredibly rare territory for HSTs to use, especially the route into Waterloo. So my friends and I hatched a plan to go to Paignton and back, going out from Waterloo via Basingstoke, and coming back via Bristol and Banbury into Paddington.
As I was living in Coventry at the time, my day started with a Pendolino from Coventry to London Euston:
0811 Coventry to London Euston, arr 0913 (actual 0924)
Headcode: 1R21, operated by Virgin Trains using Pendolino 390154
Oddly, even though it was a bank holiday, Virgin Trains were running more or less a full weekday service, complete with extra peak trains. Needless to say my train was pretty empty.
Unfortunately we were held at Rugby for seven minutes to allow the late-running 04:28 from Glasgow Central to pass us. We lost a bit more time en route and eventually arrived into Euston 11 minutes late, meaning I had to hot-foot it to Waterloo:
Northern Line: 0928 Euston to Waterloo, arr 0937
By the time I arrived the others were already on the platform for the FGW train to Penzance:
0959 London Waterloo to Newton Abbot, arr 1352
Headcode: 1V36, operated by First Great Western using HST 43168+43040
The train was fully reserved in standard class, so we walked to the far end of the train and took up a bay of seats in first class - £20 for the upgrade was more than worth it for the four-hour trip to Newton Abbot. Because the diversion entails a reversal en route, the train had first class at the country end, not the usual London end, so we had quite a trek to the far end of platform 11 to board our train.
For some bizarre reason, although the FGW HSTs were booked to leave Waterloo at xx:07 — sandwiched between the xx:05 to Weymouth and the xx:09 to Poole — they were advertised as departing eight minutes earlier. The train was advertised to depart at 09:59 — although the automated announcements at Waterloo didn't have all the stations to Penzance recorded, so the announcements had some hilarious gaps in them — but we actually pulled out at 10:07.
On previous occasions, HST diversions into Waterloo had been limited to the Windsor side, either direct from Reading via Waterloo, or from Woking via Chertsey. As I recall, this was the first time HSTs had been allowed to run along the South Western Main Line all the way up through Surbiton and Wimbledon.
We were booked non-stop from Waterloo to Basingstoke, getting a pretty decent run at 42 minutes start-to-stop — only a couple of minutes longer than a non-stop run on (then) South West Trains. One of our friends was busy and couldn't make it, so a couple of our party decided to bellow out the droplights as we went through his station — though I'm not sure the good people of SW19 were expecting to hear "GOOD MORNING, WIMBLEDON" from a passing HST!
After our stop at Basingstoke we continued towards Salisbury, getting checked briefly outside Salisbury station, before carrying on through Warminster and into Westbury. At this point we rejoined territory much more familiar for FGW HSTs, but in order to do so the driver had to change ends — the lines to Salisbury and Taunton face the same way out of Westbury. The reversal put first class into the more normal position at the back end of the train.
After the reversal, which took all of five minutes, we carried on — still bang on time — round the Frome avoiding lines, to Castle Cary, where we had a long 9-minute stand in order to regain some semblance of a "normal" path — presumably the fact that Westbury only has three platforms prevented us from dwelling there any longer.
We carried on, calling at Taunton and Tiverton Parkway, and into Exeter St David's, where we again had a long booked stand, this time of 17 minutes. This would probably have been done in order to keep most of the local service around Exeter — the lines to Barnstaple, Exmouth and Paignton — running to a relatively standard timetable.
The last leg of our journey took us down the wonderful stretch past the sea wall at Dawlish, and onwards to our arrival at Newton Abbot at 13:52, bang on time.
Unfortunately, our connecting train to Paignton was not on time; it was coming the other way, via Banbury and then via Bristol — and there had been a problem between Banbury and Oxford with a previous train, making our train just over an hour late. The original plan of having about 45 minutes in Paignton was thus scuppered, as our train was in fact going to be terminated at Newton Abbot. More significantly, this meant our train back to London was going to start from Newton Abbot.
However, while I'd previously been to Torquay some years previously, I'd never done the last bit of track from Torquay to Paignton — so I all but insisted that we get another train to Paignton and back, even if it only gave us about 10 minutes in the town. We wandered into the small town of Newton Abbot to find some lunch — I think we ended up with fish and chips — and then back to the station.
1441 Newton Abbot to Paignton, arr 1500
Headcode: 2T19, operated by First Great Western using Pacer 143603
and
1513 Paignton to Newton Abbot, arr 1529
Headcode: 2F41, operated by First Great Western using Pacer 143603
We took a Pacer to Paignton and came straight back, barely even stepping onto the platform, but at least the original aim of getting to Paignton was fulfilled. The train was fairly busy with families going to and from the seaside on a chilly but not unpleasant Good Friday. Of course, Pacers don't have first class, so we had to suffer standard class with the rest of the travelling public...
We changed at Newton Abbot once more, crossing the footbridge to our train, which was just arriving an hour later than it should have been, to head back to London.
1549 Newton Abbot to London Paddington, arr 2025
Headcode: 1A27, operated by First Great Western using HST 43010+43182
Once again, we paid the £20 upgrade to sit in first class, as this journey was nearly 5 hours long, taking an even longer route to get back to London. We retraced our steps as far as Taunton, though this time calling at Teignmouth and Dawlish, with a longer-than-usual stop at Teignmouth putting us a few minutes late, but we were back on time by Taunton.
After Taunton, we turned left at Cogload Junction instead of right, and carried on towards Bristol instead of Westbury. We called at Weston-super-Mare, which involved going on the loop through the station instead of round the (much faster) avoiding lines — which was track I hadn't been on until that day, so I was very pleased to finally do that bit of track!
From Weston we carried on to Bristol Temple Meads, calling in platform 7 before carrying on to call at Bath Spa, Chippenham and Swindon. So far, so normal for a train to Paddington... but it was about to get decidedly weird.
We continued up the Great Western Main Line towards Didcot, but just before Didcot we turned left — at Foxhall Junction — to take the Didcot West Curve, a piece of track making up the third side of the triangle at Didcot, which normally gets very few passenger trains. It briefly saw a regular service in the early 2000s, when FGW tried running direct trains between Bristol and Oxford, but they never took off.
(Actually, until recently the last CrossCountry train from Reading to Birmingham ran via Foxhall Junction to reverse there and use the Didcot West Curve — for route knowledge retention purposes — and by coincidence I'd been on exactly that train three days previously, after an evening ticking off the old connection between the main part of Reading station and the "Southern" lines towards Wokingham... but that's another story.)
So to get to go round the Didcot West Curve (just before sunset) was great fun, and a bizarre bit of track to be doing on a train from Newton Abbot to Paddington. We kept going to Oxford, which was our last passenger stop before London Paddington, before continuing north.
The train then carried on northwards to Banbury, where we reversed — and in order to allow the reversal to take place, two brand-new semaphore signals had been installed! There had long been shunt signals to allow reversals to take place, but these are not generally allowed to be used by passenger trains, so they were replaced with brand-new signals, complete with finials (the decorative pointy caps on top of the signal post).
From Banbury we then retraced our steps back to Aynho Junction, turning left there and heading through Bicester North and up the Chiltern route towards London. (Now, you may ask why we didn't use the direct line from Oxford to Bicester to save the faff of reversing at Banbury. The answer is that back in 2013, the line from Oxford to Bicester Town was just a branch line, with the Bicester south chord not having been built — so reversal at Banbury was the only option.)
We carried on through Princes Risborough, High Wycombe and Gerrards Cross — all most unusual places for a FGW HST to be passing through! — before getting to West Ruislip. If we carried on we would have ended up at London Marylebone, so instead here we crossed over, to head south on the northbound track as far as South Ruislip, in order to gain the single line towards Greenford.
The line from South Ruislip to Greenford and onwards to Old Oak Common is the remants of the New North Main Line: the Chiltern route was originally a joint venture between the Great Western Railway and the Great Central Railway, to provide them both with a faster route to Birmingham.
However, the connection to Paddington fell into disuse from the 1990s, when services towards Birmingham were concentrated on London Marylebone. A single Chiltern Railways train per day was retained between London Paddington and West Ruislip to keep up route knowledge. But even that ceased to run in December 2018, when the route between Old Oak Common and Greenford was required to close for conversion to use by HS2, meaning that the Chiltern service now only runs between West Ealing and West Ruislip.
So to have a FGW HST running along this stretch of the New North Main Line, while incredibly rare, was a sort-of tribute to a bygone age of express trains from Paddington to Birmingham (and on to Birkenhead!), and the unusual track made for a very enjoyable end to a long day.
We'd made good time en route; although we'd left Banbury about 7 minutes late, the timings through Greenford had a bit of slack in them (a sensible precaution when trying to run four trains per hour over a single-track line), so we arrived into Paddington platform 8 four minutes early at 20:21.
The five of us went our separate ways, and I grabbed a bite to eat (I think I may have gone to McDonalds, but I don't remember all that well now!) before heading for the tube to Euston:
Bakerloo Line: 2046 Paddington to Oxford Circus, arr 2054
Victoria Line: 2056 Oxford Circus to Euston, arr 2058
I opted for the double-back at Oxford Circus, this being a little bit faster than the Circle Line — and I'm glad I did, as I made a train back to Coventry with just a minute to spare:
2103 London Euston to Coventry, arr 2206
Headcode: 1G46, operated by Virgin Trains using Pendolino 390154
By sheer coincidence, I ended up on the same Pendolino that I'd had that morning! The run back to Coventry was much less eventful than the morning run, and I arrived back on time to complete a 673¼-mile day, and one of my longest-ever days on trains.
I recently discovered that I'd managed to save some paper timetables from the day — such was the extent of the works that FGW deemed it worth producing hefty booklets showing all the trains on their diversionary routes (though an hilarious misprint meant "Taunton" was printed instead of "Truro" on the front cover!).
The dates on the cover tell another story: although the full block at Reading was only four days, there then followed a week of a very temporary weekday timetable, with only half of Reading station open, while they tied the remaining tracks back together.
That temporary timetable did not go very well: the timetabling was a bit too optimistic, and coupled with a slightly late completion of the engineering works, Easter Tuesday did not go well for FGW. A few hasty changes were made to the timetable for the rest of the week.
But, after another all-line block on the following Sunday to complete the works, the station reopened in full the following Monday (8th April) and settled down to work in a temporary configuration for a couple of years, while the flyover was being built.
Two years later, another all-line block at Easter 2015 was undertaken, with similar diversions, to complete the work at Reading and bring the flyover into use. (I confess that I'd enjoyed the 2013 diversions so much that I did it that I took a trip to Taunton and back in 2015 to experience it all over again — though that trip I did the other way round!)
Ever since, Reading has gone from being one of the worst-performing stations, causing delay to almost every passenger who passed through, to one of the best-performing stations in the country — a testament to a vision for change on the railways.
I hope to write more of these blogs in the future to keep us all sane during lockdown — let me know if there's any particular areas of the country from which you'd like to hear about my travels!
