Great Western’s timetable

Sadly, as I have mentioned before, the excellent South West Trains timetable has not been published this summer. Might it return under First management?

This leaves just one quality book in the country from an operator with a large network - that from Great Western Railway. To get over the nonsense of operators seemingly being obliged to publish just before Christmas, they have managed to date this until December 31.

At 512 pages, its introduction alone is 65 pages, with information on tickets, engineering work, on-board facilities, and even a history of each of its 20 named trains.

Seating plans of long-distance rolling stock are included, plus layouts of its Sleepers. The station list has details of every station it serves, including ticket office opening hours.

The bus links section includes frequencies and journey times to 106 places. Very useful summary tables exist for routes such as London to Reading, Reading to Didcot Parkway, and Taunton to Exeter.

There is a good system map with table numbers shown, meaning using it is the easiest way to navigate around the book. I have never liked the grouping of tables into East, Central and West, but it’s actually worse this time in that there are tables such as C3a, C3b, C3c and C3d appearing after C3, yet they are shown as just C3 on the map. However, that’s the only deficiency of an otherwise splendid book.

Copies are just £5 and available from Bath Spa, Bristol Parkway, Bristol Temple Meads, Cheltenham Spa, Exeter St Davids, London Paddington, Newbury, Oxford, Penzance, Plymouth, Reading, Slough, Swindon, Taunton, Truro and Westbury, plus by post for an additional £3.90 by ringing GWR’s Customer Support on 0345 700 0125 (0600-2300 daily).