Cancellations to services on all routes

Due to severe weather:

Train services running across the whole Great Western Railway network may be cancelled, delayed or revised. Disruption is expected until 23:59 26/06.
Customer Advice
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Amended service to run during extreme heat following rare Met Office red weather warning.
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Essential travel only on Wednesday 24 and Thursday 25 June into, through, or out of the red warning area.
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Due to a rare red warning of extreme heat, customers are being warned of essential travel only on Wednesday and Thursday.
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Extreme heat can cause rails to expand and buckle, so when temperatures reach certain thresholds, trains must run more slowly to keep services safe. This will mean fewer trains and slightly longer journey times during the warmest periods of each day.
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Prolonged high temperatures can also affect equipment on our older regional train fleet, including engines and cooling systems. This means there may be some short-notice changes or cancellations, particularly during the hottest parts of the day.

To help customers, those with tickets to travel on Tuesday 23, Wednesday 24 and Thursday 25 June can use them to travel on Monday 22, Tuesday 23 and up to and including Friday 26 June. The ticket changes apply to those travelling into, through, or out of the red warning zone local journeys in Devon and Cornwall do not apply.
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While we expect to operate the majority of services across the network, the reduction follows the Met Office extreme heat weather warning from Monday 22 June until Thursday 25 June.

 

So, normal service say from EXD to PNZ.....never in red area.

Dangerous statement.

 
It would have been helpful if public-facing information systems had given a fullsummary of the cancellations planned.

For example, all the Bristol-Salisbury services seem to be planned cancellations, but they don't appear on gwr.com or Journeycheck.com (or at least, not where I've searched for them.

Oh yeah, it's covered by "cancellations on all routes". Not very helpful and, one might observe, not all routes are equal when cancellations are decided.

 
Ever so slightly sarcastic piece in the Daily Mash
https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/britains-invincible-rail-networks-finally-defeated-by-heatwave-20260624267316

 
Its a good thing that this is fallow year for Glastonbury

 
Ahh, all explained why it is not raining at all in Somerset..

 
When were those thunderstorms?

 

From past reading an understanding, there is a cutoff and different system for trains cancelled/changed well in advance (48 hours?) and those which change shortly before they were due to run.  We've seen what I believe to be the effect of this on things like the closed-for-too-long Looe line where the first days made it to Journey Check and the feed we use for our disruption map, but then it became planned-further-ahead and did not flag in the short term changes.

Having a cutoff makes sense in that it avoids flooding the system at times of planned engineering works

I suspect that for this week, many changes were put into the system at or near the cutoff.

 
Pretty bad day for anyone needing to (rather than choosing to) travel

Graphic on front page currently has
Cancelled 225
Part route 97

Rare to be over 300

 
Melksham-Bristol commute not too bad - the Plan A 05:11 Gloucester-Southampton (to Trowbridge) was cancelled (train fault), but the plan B 06:35 Salisbury-Worcester (to Chippenham) was ok.

Then the 06:28 Paddington-Weston was delayed by 23 mins at Chippenham (speed restriction), but the official connection of the 07:00 Oxford-Bristol was only a minute late (07:48) so got to the office on time (for plan B).

I could claim for the plan A cancellation but not going to bother. I could/should have worked from home today, but I had to do that for the other 2 days I was supposed to be in the office this week (not due to weather), so felt I should show my face.

 
Only one train for Newquay (not a 175) and one on Falmouth and Okehampton, none on Looe. It has had the benefit of more 150's on  Paignton- Exmouth.

 

...and then went on the forum.   

 
What else am I supposed to do now that AI is doing all my work for me?

Seriously, I used to spend 99% of my time writing/reviewing code. Since my employer gave me my Claude Code (Anthropic) license a month or 2 ago I haven't written a single line of code, and Claude does the reviews (of its own work!) as well.

So I'll probably be spending a lot more time on the forum before long...

 
Ouch. Also, I've not really recovered from seeing Anthropic's logo yet.

Mark

 
Given that a red warning has now been issued for tomorrow (Friday), it's reasonable to assume that the current level of hundreds of cancellations/alterations will continue.

Have mentioned this elsewhere, but it's worth noting that a lot of the "more trains than usual needing repair" excuse would appear to be due to insufficient aircon in drivers' cabs.

 
I remember a few years ago 143s and 150s had bottled water on board so the guard could give to passengers. A lot of it was stored at Paignton.

 
Last week I was on a delayed train in Austria with non-functioning a/c when a member of onboard staff unlocked a cupboard near my seat to reveal a large stash of bottled water which was then distributed among passengers. That wouldn't happen here I'd guess because operators would rather use the space to cram in more seats.