Thought you might be interested in seeing the reply I had from Richard Coats after I took your advice and emailed him:Many thanks for your email. I’ve also had a look at the discussion on the Acton W3 forum, and the reply from Chris Davies at FGW. I’m very pleased to see so many people taking an interest in the service at Acton ML. My personal view is that Acton ML is going through a particularly bad phase at the moment, levels of vandalism seem to be increasing, the ticket office has recently often been closed when advertised as open, and the Customer Information System (CIS) has died altogether. The overall impression is one of neglect. I recently raised these concerns (July 12th) with the station manager but have had no reply from him as yet. The upgrade of the CIS is a saga that has been running for at least three years now. I think we will be getting new screens at Acton ML very soon, although the April-May estimate I was last given has clearly passed. I will pass on the new estimate when I get it. I really don’t think there is any excuse for letting the old system completely fail in the meantime (Acton ML is not the only station with this problem), alternative audio announcements would be a help but I’ve heard none. I understand that there are many difficulties with an IT project of this type, but other rail companies in the London area seem to have coped much better than FGW, and my view is that this is an area where there as either been project management failure, or insufficient funding/resourcing. I will raise it at the next meeting. The service frequency, and the fact that Acton ML is effectively a part of the branch line service to Greenford does seem a waste of a potentially excellent transport resource. There was a franchise commitment for an extra Slough stopping service which might have provided extra trains at Acton ML – FGW tried to implement it but were blocked by Network Rail who were concerned that the extra paths would reduce punctuality. The decision not to stop the Heathrow Connect at Acton ML seems to relate to turn around times at Paddington – this may well be true (and timetabling is a surprisingly complex business). Late night services are even worse and those going into London finish very early. In the last timetable there was one particularly huge evening gap in the service from Paddington, but FGW agreed to stop an extra service which has helped somewhat. The issue of a Sunday service is to my mind a scandal. If you look at the FGW stations within Greater London more than half have no Sunday Service. I don’t think there is any other part of London that has such a drop in service on Sundays. The main reason I have been given is that Network Rail take possession of the tracks for engineering works, and it is therefore not possible to run services to station which don’t have platforms on all four tracks. My view is that a Sunday service running 80% of the time when there are no relevant engineering works would be much better than none. The issues of service frequency and Sunday services would be best solved by making them a franchise commitment. I also suspect that if Ealing council were more active on this issue that progress could be made. I would strongly encourage you and the other Acton W3 users, to raise the issue both with their MPs and councillors. I think the only way we will get a (pre-Crossrail) Sunday service is if the DFT can be persuaded to specify it. On the plus side, Crossrail is coming (in 7 years), and it should revolutionise every aspect of the service at Acton ML. Best regards, Richard Coats
J Thomas ● 5525d