The Best Meal I’ve Ever Had On A Scheduled Train
I’ve eaten on many trains and used to regularly enjoy breakfast on Ipswich to London in the past, when they had a dining car. In some ways the most memorable was a return from Teeside to London behind a Class 55, where the driver showed what a Deltic could do.
I’ve also travelled with C on the Eastern and Oriental Express.
But no meal on a train could compare with the one I ate going from Paddington to St. Ives in one of First Great Western’s InterCity 125s. They call it Pullman Fine Dining.
I had found out that they were serving lunch on the 11:30 from Paddington, so I booked myself on that train. There was a bit of a mix-up between the train times and the web site, but as you can see, I got my high-class lunch.
As a coeliac, what really impressed me was the professional way they dealt with allergies. In fact, if anybody wants to open a restaurant, they could do no better than copy the openness.
The two courses I ate were excellent, as was the service.
I do hope that this form of catering leads to similar offerings on other lines.
There was only two things wrong with the meal.
I had to eat it by myself and it would have been so much better with a travelling companion.
The other was that First Great Western don’t have a card, which says when this service is offered. I’m off to Cardiff on Tuesday, so could I get lunch on the way down?
The Bridge Over Crossrail
I’ve seen this footbridge that might give a view into the Crossrail site at Royal Oak station before.
The Bridge Over Crossrail
I wonder if it still accessible. I’ve just looked on Google Maps and obtained this picture of the \area.
The Footbridge Over Crossrail
I think the bridge is clearly shown in this picture stretching across the tracks, starting from the s in Westbourne. Note too, the signal gantry, just to the right.
So it seems, if I was to go to Royal Oak station and walk along Westbourne Park Villas, I might get access to the bridge.
Would This Help People Stop Smoking?
On my bus this morning a young lady was reading a book called How To Stop Smoking.
As I got out I wished her the best of luck. She smiled back and said it was difficult.
So did my encouragement help?
I don’t and never will know! But just as women, who are pregnant often wear a badge saying Baby On Board, would it help to give up smoking, if you wore a badge saying I’m Trying To Give Up.
Perhaps others would offer words of encouragement that helped.
Before Crossrail – The Proposed Schedule
Wikipedia has a schedule of proposed services. I have broken this down to get the figures for my catalogue of stations. Starting in the East, they can be summarised as follows.
Shenfield Branch
This will have 12 tph (trains per hour) in the peak and 6 tph in the off-peak, calling at all stations and going through the central tunnel to the West.
In addition, there will be other services going into Liverpool Street. Wikipedia is saying 10 tph in the peak and 5 tph in the off-peak. Some will be limited stop, but it does look like that all stations will get at least 6 tph in the off-peak and some will get around ten.
As this is a substantially better service than exists today, you must be extremely pleased if you own or have just bought a house along the branch.
Abbey Wood Branch
Like the Shenfield branch, this branch is scheduled to get 12 tph in the peak, but the off-peak level is not stated.
If the off-peak is the same as the Shenfield branch, then that figure must probably be added to the 10 tph services Abbey Wood enjoys at the moment into other London termini.
Central Section
24 tph in the peak will pass through the central tunnels, with plans for 14 tph to turn-back at Paddington.
The off-peak is not stated, but if the Shenfield branch figures are correct, then it could be something like 12 tph, with perhaps 7 tph to Paddington only.
As the Class 345 trains will be so much larger than the typical Underground train, this will be a tremendous increase in capacity across Central London.
Western Branch – Paddington to West Drayton
As West Drayton will be served by trains to all the Western termini and will also turnback a couple of trains per hour, it should get 10 tph in the peak going through the central tunnels. Wikipedia says it will get ten in the off-peak as well, so that probably means my figure of seven off-peak trains turning at Paddington is wrong.
There will also be other trains going direct to Paddington. 4 tph are currently proposed to be the Heathrow Express. I can’t see this high-priced service surviving long past Crossrail’s opening in its present form.
Heathrow Branch
Wikipedia says that 4 tph will go to Heathrow all day and hopefully all night, running all the way to Shenfield and Abbey Wood. But these services will not go to Terminal 5 and the expensive Heathrow Express will still be running.
I think that there’ll be some replanning here. I know this is old an article in the Daily Mail from 2012, but it shows that Boris Johnson and others, think that Crossrail should go to Terminal 5.
As Terminal 5 could be joined to Reading, it might be that some Crossrail services from Reading go via Heathrow.
Western Branch – Beyond West Drayton
It looks like 2 tph will go to each of Maidenhead and Reading, with an additional 2 tph going limited-stop from Reading to Paddington.
The Anonymous Widower 