Do not presume - there may be a "Plan B" - or perhaps a "Plan [later letter]" now as there have been a number of plan updates along the way, and I would not bet on this news being terminal when bad news has not been terminal for them in the past.

12th May 1945 - First "Thomas the Tank Engine" book published - (link)

The crowdfunding attempt has been abandoned today apparently. 

So presumably this long term ‘railway’ project will now become a footnote in the history books. Was this ORR’s intention all along - to force Go-Op to find the funds or withdraw?

Paul

Paddington 175 late. It ran through platform 1 at Castle Cary according to RTT, which is only available from Taunton. So the booked route via Honiton was not taken. Likewise it seems to have gone via the B&H, with not the booked call at Swindon

https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:G45618/2025-05-11/detailed

It left Exeter St Davids 200 minutes late, having arrived there on time, and travelled via Honiton and back onto planned route at Castle Cary.  It was planned to run via Melksham and Swindon but as far as I can tell diverted via Newbury and arrived reading at 06:30 - 145 minutes late as stated.  I suspect it will be cancelled in from there.

Diverted via Melksham perhaps?
A long lie-in this morning for passengers.
Arrived Reading 0630 (145 minutes late), but still there as I type!

Does route knowledge apply to bus drivers?   I can recall before the days of SatNav helping rail replacement bus drivers find the way.

21:45 Penzance to London Paddington due 05:04
21:45 Penzance to London Paddington due 05:04 will be diverted between Exeter St Davids and Reading.

It will be delayed between Exeter St Davids and Reading and is expected to be 120 minutes late.

This is due to a fault on this train.

06:50 London Paddington to Great Malvern due 09:29 will be cancelled.
This is due to a fault on this train.
Last Updated:12/05/2025 06:45

09:55 Great Malvern to London Paddington due 12:23 will be cancelled.
This is due to a fault on this train.
Last Updated:12/05/2025 06:45

A yellow weather warning has been issued for thunderstorms, which could lead to flooding in parts of England and Wales.

The warning covers areas including Wales, the Midlands, west of England, London and the South East from 12:00 BST to 22:00 on Monday, the Met Office said.

Up to 50mm (1.9in) of rain could fall within a few hours, with a possibility of delays and some cancellations to train and bus services.

England has had its driest start to spring for 69 years, the Environment Agency said earlier this month.

Showers are forecast to drift in from the south in the early hours of Monday, the Met Office said.

Temperatures across the board are due to remain mild in the high teens or early 20s.

The Met Office said there was the "potential for minor localised issues" and flash flooding.

Sunshine and settled conditions will return across the UK for the rest of the week, with temperatures forecast to reach 23C in some parts.

Last week, the Environment Agency warned that water companies that more must be done to safeguard water supplies.

Many places have gone without any rain for weeks, including Preston in Lancashire and parts of Fife which have been dry since mid-April.

According to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology's three month Drought Index, large parts of the UK are in the 'extremely dry' category.

Ticket website also faces uncertainty over hit to foreign travel and government plan for UK rail booking system

The online rail ticket retailer Trainline has warned of “headwinds”, including the expansion of London’s contactless travel zone and economic uncertainty denting foreign travel.

Shares in the London-listed company tumbled by as much as 8% on Wednesday, before recovering slightly to a fall of 4%, despite reporting surging profits for the year to 28 February.

Trainline, which has 18 million customers and mostly makes money from earning commission on sales of coach and rail tickets, has benefited from the growing popularity among travellers of digital tickets over their paper equivalents.

However, the company said on Wednesday that the expansion of Transport for London’s (TfL) contactless travel zone could impact sales growth. TfL began an expansion of the zone in February to include 47 commuter stations in the south-east, such as Sevenoaks and Bletchley, meaning passengers will not require separate tickets.

Trainline said it was facing “headwinds” from the continuing impact of Google’s changes to its search-engine results and “recent macroeconomic uncertainty” that could affect foreign travel.

The company also faces a significant threat to its business in its main UK market, amid government plans to create an online train ticket retailer as part of its dedicated public body, Great British Railways (GBR).

Trainline has grown quickly in recent years as customers have used it to find tickets in a rail system operated by several private-sector companies which sometimes operate on the same route.

In an attempt to simplify the process of buying tickets from different rail operators, Labour wants to create a single retailer, which will be made available once GBR has been established, although this is not expected before late 2026.

Trainline shares have plummeted by more than a third so far this year with the prospect of a rival, amid fears it could erode the company’s dominant position in the market.

Trainline said on Wednesday that it and other independent retailers were “taking an increasingly assertive stance with the government to deliver on its commitment to deliver a fair, open and competitive future retail market”.

Trainline reported an operating profit of £86m for the last financial year, 56% higher than a year earlier, and brought in record sales. The company recorded £5.9bn from selling tickets, 12% higher than a year earlier, which was mostly driven by fast sales growth and expansion in European countries.

However, it is forecasting lower net ticket sales growth of between 6% and 9% in the coming year, while it also expects slower revenue growth of between 0% and 3%.

‘It’s an illogical job’: Why driving a train isn’t as cushy as it might seem

The rulebook is hefty, the hours are awful and the hurdles to becoming a train driver huge. But 18-year-olds can now apply

Few professions’ pay have aroused such incredulous ire as train drivers: earning an average of nearly £70,000 a year, going on strike to demand more, and they don’t even have to steer. But if it really is such a cushy number, why doesn’t Britain have enough drivers – and what does it take to join their ranks?

Driver shortages have become a leading cause of disruption on Britain’s railways; about seven out of eight “P-coded” cancellations, made the night before travel, are down to a missing driver.

Parts of the timetable still rely on drivers working voluntary overtime. Also looming is a potential mass exodus, with thousands of drivers recruited in boom years now approaching retirement.

That prompted the government to announce this week that it was changing the rules to allow 18-year-olds to start driving trains – two years younger than the current legal minimum.

But as recent job adverts for Northern Railway show, driving may not be quite the money for old rope that headlines sometimes imply. The training salary of £26,000 rises to £62,000 in three years; but the attributes required include “diligence and moral courage”, “zero tolerance for drugs and alcohol” and “exceptional concentration skills within a low-stimulus environment”, not to mention 3am starts.

Still, the Department for Transport wants at least 5,000 more drivers and hopes that gen Z will help them meet that target. According to the DfT, nearly half of qualified drivers are over the age of 50, while only 3% are under 30.

In the East Midlands Railway (EMR) training centre, at the back of Derby train station, the new recruits are typically later life career changers, including some who work in different roles in the railway.

“We have a lot of ex-police, ex-fire brigade, who tend to like the rules and regulations,” says Mark Letman, EMR’s lead operations training manager and himself ex-army. He oversees 50 to 60 trainees a year, starting with an 18-week intensive theory course on the drivers’ rulebook.

Tim Joyce, 53, is retraining after 30 years in the fire service. Of his new life, he says: “It’s similar in many ways – you have to learn the rules but ultimately be ready to apply them in the real world.”


He shows his copy of the rulebook, known as “the brick” or “the bible”: a hefty tome generously bookmarked with multicoloured labels. “These modules are up to 100 pages each and there are maybe 40 of them,” Joyce says.

Letman picks up the brick and counts through: “Twenty-one.”

Either way, it looks heavy for a driver to have to lug around every day. “He carries it between his ears,” Letman says, tapping his head with a look that suggests this Guardian correspondent will never be a train driver.The trainees have been through two rounds of interviews as well as psychometric tests – on which the failure rate alone is 60% to 70%. The exam on the rulebook requires a 90% score to pass and driver competency is checked every two years.

Drivers have to live near a depot and travel there and back when other public transport is probably unavailable. That means most are recruited locally – though in EMR’s case that can be London as well as Boston. Anita Bradfield, 60, is in training to work out of St Pancras, having already swapped a career in dancing to work for Network Rail as a mobile operations manager.

“I’d go out to assist drivers and be seeing them every day – I thought it’d be good to have a go!’ she says. “It’s a challenge and good learning. No day is ever the same.”

If the trainees pass the theory exam, they go on to what Letman calls the “traction phase”: learning the nuts and bolts of train driving in class and using a new £1.5m simulator. Only then are they sent to the depot with a mentor and instructors to rack up 200 hours of driving under instruction before being let loose alone with passengers. The whole process takes at least eight months.


Among the EMR trainees, Charlie Potts, at 22, is part of the more elusive demographic the industry is chasing, having decided after a geography and urban planning degree to listen to his old man. “My dad was a train driver – and he always talked it up.”

School leavers without such connections could now be persuaded, Letman says. “The good thing now is we can go into schools and say it could be a career now, for life.”


One of those trying the EMR simulators, though not yet aiming to switch jobs, was the transport secretary, Heidi Alexander. “The driver shortage problem is a genuine problem across the UK,” she said. “Especially in parts of the country, strangely, where we’re trying hardest to improve services, like the north-east.”


The new age rules, Alexander said, were only “part of the puzzle” but could make a big difference. “Giving young people when they’re leaving school or college the ability to go straight into training to be a driver, instead of having to worry what they’re going to do for a couple of years, is really significant.”

The pandemic exacerbated the shortage of drivers: Covid-era regulations halted training and many drivers also sought a better work-life balance. Fewer passengers and lower fare revenue also left the government underwriting train companies, leaving a cash-strapped sector freezing pay.

Strikes ensued and a loss of goodwill persists. Much of the railway relies on rest-day working, or voluntary overtime, and in many places, drivers no longer fancy it. But there is still demand for jobs, Whelan says. “We’ve seen places like Wales recently advertise drivers’ jobs and they’ve been inundated.”

That could diversify the workforce, the industry hopes. According to Aslef, the train drivers union, the average entry age is 34, which Mick Whelan, the general secretary, says “concerns us massively”. Few women in particular, he says, want to change careers at that point in life.

So why can’t we recruit more? “It’s the hurdles,” Whelan says. “It’s an illogical job when you think about it, sitting in a little can, working at 120 miles an hour, relying on the infrastructure below you and pressing a little handle to stop at a point three miles away you can’t see. People keep making out if you drive a bus, drive a car, you can drive a train. You can’t.”

Aslef continues to campaign for what it calls “dignity at work”. While passenger carriages, air-conditioning and seats have been refurbished, drivers have sometimes been left in old cabs. Drivers also have to cope with sparse toilet facilities. In one tragic case in 2022, a driver was killed by another train after, accident investigators believe, stopping in a siding to urinate.

And, Whelan says, “People forget it’s shift work.

When you’re walking down a siding at 3.20am in the rain to get a train ready and it’s freezing cold, it’s not quite as pretty as when you’re rolling into a station in the sunlight.”

Man charged with rape and sexual assault of girls

A man has been charged after a 16-year-old girl was raped and a 17-year-old girl was sexually assaulted.

Sonny Boyes, 19, from Exeter, has been charged with two offences of rape and three offences of sexual assault.

Devon and Cornwall Police said the incidents took place in the area of Digby and Sowton train station in Exeter between 20:45 and 22:00 BST on Friday.

Mr Boyes is due to appear at Exeter Magistrates' Court on Monday.

Det Insp Emma LeFort said specialist officers were supporting the girls.

"We continue to investigate the incidents and want to hear from anyone who was in the vicinity of Digby and Sowton railway station, or on a train passing through, between 20:45 and 22:00 on Friday," she added.

Might not be possible due to driver hours and route knowledge. I do wonder how many passengers this would impact and whether a taxi might be a better option