Disgrace of rugby’s secret trains
SECRET trains. Great Western railways’ approach to this rugby World Cup gets stranger by the day.
Despite reports to the contrary, there were two GWR departures from Paddington to Cardiff after England’s match with Wales on saturday night: it’s just that GWR didn’t tell anyone about them.
records show there was a GWR service from Paddington at 23.30 and another at 00.00. Yet all news coverage the day before the game said the last train from london was at 22.00 and nothing could run west of Bristol after that due to engineering works. These missives all contained comments from GWR which made no mention of the two late trains.
GWR have since confirmed they were contingency services, and unpublicised. It’s there in the GWR statement from last Friday if you can decode.
‘The contingency plans we have in place are working.’
And what is a contingency plan? It’s a train. But you’ve got to be on the inside to know that. maybe it left from Platform 9 ¾ like the one to Hogwarts. Passengers could run at a wall and see if they ended up on board. Clearly, GWR feared the consequences of stranding or disappointing passengers making a frantic dash back to town. Considering the queues and crush at Twickenham, and that london-bound trains return to Waterloo, not Paddington, the 23.30 was not a realistic ambition for all but those with the fastest legs and sharpest elbows.
Even GWR estimate the journey time to any of their stations post-match as ‘ at least’ an hour. To pick up a connection at reading, say, would have meant being aboard a train going west from Twickenham no later than 22.40. Another tall order.
But the 00.00? Potentially, that was reachable. Well, it would be if you knew about it. What GWR didn’t want was several thousand Welsh fans scrambling back to Paddington, in the forlorn hope of connecting with a service that was plainly inadequate for the job. There would be a risk of overcrowding, even of aggression, if thousands were then stuck. This, in its own way, is an even greater scandal.
GWR did run trains. But for those in the know, like them, not us.