Following on from leaves on the line, the wrong kind of snow and nausea inducing Pendolino trains there appears to be a new menace stalking the British rail network.
This is something of which I have direct experience and while I don't wish to bore you all with the minutiae of these occurrences, I will outline my most recent experience as an illustration.
Last week, I caught the 8:14 pm service from Cardiff Central to Warminster, Wiltshire. The rolling stock consisted of a 4 car unit and I would say the train was running at about 25% of full capacity. Now, I know there were no problems with this train as I was listening intently throughout the course of the journey as I was noting the frequency of clicketty clacks for my survey on the discontinuities in continuous rail on the rail network (i think i may have mentioned this before). So you can imagine my surprise when, upon pulling alongside Platform 3 at Bristol Temple Meads Station, we were informed that, owing to a technical fault, we would have to disembark and board another train on Platform 5. On reaching platform 5 and seeing the single car set awaiting us for the remainder of our journey, it suddenly dawned on me what was going on here. Ostensibly, we were detrained due to a technical fault but the reality of the situation was that, since we were running at low capacity, our rolling stock was sequestrated to furnish the needs of another service.
As I said, this was not an isolated incedent and I am in the process of chronicling my experiences for submission in a report to the Association Of Train Operating Companies so I would like to solicit your views on the subject and would be very interested in particular to hear from anyone who has themselves been subjected to an involuntary detraining of such a nature.
This is something of which I have direct experience and while I don't wish to bore you all with the minutiae of these occurrences, I will outline my most recent experience as an illustration.
Last week, I caught the 8:14 pm service from Cardiff Central to Warminster, Wiltshire. The rolling stock consisted of a 4 car unit and I would say the train was running at about 25% of full capacity. Now, I know there were no problems with this train as I was listening intently throughout the course of the journey as I was noting the frequency of clicketty clacks for my survey on the discontinuities in continuous rail on the rail network (i think i may have mentioned this before). So you can imagine my surprise when, upon pulling alongside Platform 3 at Bristol Temple Meads Station, we were informed that, owing to a technical fault, we would have to disembark and board another train on Platform 5. On reaching platform 5 and seeing the single car set awaiting us for the remainder of our journey, it suddenly dawned on me what was going on here. Ostensibly, we were detrained due to a technical fault but the reality of the situation was that, since we were running at low capacity, our rolling stock was sequestrated to furnish the needs of another service.
As I said, this was not an isolated incedent and I am in the process of chronicling my experiences for submission in a report to the Association Of Train Operating Companies so I would like to solicit your views on the subject and would be very interested in particular to hear from anyone who has themselves been subjected to an involuntary detraining of such a nature.
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