Rail passengers travelling to, from or through Swindon are being told to check before they travel, after Great Western Railway confirmed two weekends of engineering disruption on the route between London Paddington, Swindon, Bristol Parkway and South Wales. The worst of it falls on 31 October and 1 November, when services will run less frequently, trains between Swindon and Bristol Parkway will be diverted, and departures from Reading, Didcot Parkway, Swindon and Paddington will leave earlier than timetabled. The 10.53am service from Swindon to Bristol Temple Meads on the Sunday will not run at all.
A second round of works follows a week later. On Sunday 8 November, the line between Didcot Parkway and Swindon will close entirely until 10.55am, with replacement buses standing in for the missing trains. The 8.37am and 9.15am services from Swindon to Paddington will instead start from Didcot, with buses laid on to get passengers there first. Some trains will bypass Swindon altogether, while others will terminate at the station, leaving travellers to complete the rest of the journey by road. GWR says the work will improve the railway and has urged passengers to check before travelling, which in railway terms means something between a suggestion and a warning.
A Great Western Railway spokesperson confirmed the timing was entirely coincidental and had nothing to do with the dates either side of it, one weekend built around things disappearing without warning, the next around things going off unexpectedly. It is understood no one at head office had noticed until a journalist pointed it out, at which point the spokesperson went quiet for slightly longer than a spokesperson usually does.
Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, said she had no plans to travel but took a close interest regardless. 'They're putting buses on instead of trains,' she said, 'and calling it an improvement. In my day, if the train didn't turn up, nobody dressed it up as progress. Ron used to say British Rail could vanish a service without any help from Halloween at all, and he wasn't wrong.' She added that she had written the dates on her calendar in red biro, 'the same as I do for the bins.'
Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the disruption had given him a new way of describing his own band's transport logistics for a gig in Bristol later that month. 'We're calling it a routing optimisation,' he said. 'Drummer goes via Didcot, I go via Swindon, and if either of us actually arrives, that's a bonus, really.' He added that he had offered GWR a quote for printed signage reading 'Please Use Alternative Route', on the basis that 'nobody's ever regretted investing in clear, confident messaging during a crisis.'
By the second weekend, commuters at Swindon reported a growing sense that the replacement bus had become the only genuinely reliable form of transport in the county, arriving precisely when a train was not going to, and vanishing into the Didcot fog the moment one did. One regular passenger said she had started to find the bus more trustworthy than the app, which still listed the 10.53 as running, apparently unaware of its own cancellation.
The 10.53 to Bristol Temple Meads, for its part, declined to comment, on account of not existing.