| Re: Bath Spa to Bradford and back Posted by bobm at 10:55, 26th April 2026 |     |
On Saturday the line was closed between Bath Spa and Chippenham. Trains ran from London Paddington to Chippenham and back. Bath Spa was also served from Paddington via Swindon, Bristol Parkway and Bristol Temple Meads before reversing for the last leg. Today the closure extends to include Chippenham and the single line to Melksham.
| Bath Spa to Bradford and back Posted by Mark A at 09:35, 26th April 2026 | |
A return trip to Bradford - courtesy of advance standard Crosscountry class tickets upgraded to first for the wriggle room that offers during a three and a half hour leg of the journey.
On the return journey, we were very glad to leave the five carriage Crosscountry service at Bristol because there was a heavy passenger flow in full flight there, the crosscountry train did the usual Bristol thing of running clean through the station to the country end (its apparently done to manage congestion on the platform but created quite a bit of its own - many of said heavy passenger flow pursued the train and a lot started boarding at Coach 'A' oblivious to the four people who were getting off, with the train manager heroically trying to sort things. After ten minutes or so everyone did get aboard though but I hate to think what it was like on the train.
After which, the last part of the journey to Bath took an hour, with a train cancellation, unexplained engineering works that weren't being well represented on realtimetrains, which was simply getting things wrong, or by staff at the station - the entire network apart from Leeds and Bradford feeling understaffed, probably because they were lost in the crowds - and a platform change from 11 to 0 and back to 11 which, with luggage, was 'Unhelpful'. We finally flew through the barriers at Bath as the crush before the barriers had built up enough that staff there opened them to clear things a bit.
I'm presuming that Bathampton Junction was closed in one direction for engineering works and wouldn't be surprised if some at Bristol heading for Bath, boarded the IEPs heading for Paddington via Parkway and ended up travelling back via Swindon.
Mark
