I was planning a visit north of the river to my parents this week,
whose nearest station is Drayton Green (née Halt) on the Greenford
branch line from Paddington.

A cursory quick check on nationalrail.co.uk's OJP returned the error
"We are sorry, we are not able to find any trains that match your
journey details". Curious, so I head to FGW's site to see if I can
figure out what's going on. Their LDB link from the front page shows
no trains running from Drayton Green, or elsewhere on the Greenford
branch only stations. Maybe there's a problem on the line or
something, so it's back to FGW's homepage and thence to the 'live
updates' link which takes me through to their JourneyCheck page.
There's 5 sets of "improvement works" affecting journeys today, but
none relating to trains to/from Greenford, apparently.

Next port of call is the NRE website, and their "current service
disruptions" page. I see there's a heading for "Overnight engineering
work affecting First Great Western services from Monday 15 to Friday
19 August 2011", but given that FGW give up running Greenford trains
after around 10pm that's not going to be related to my journey. (It
was actually related to services around Swansea).

After a bit more digging around, it turns out the Chiltern blockade is
the culprit. Hunting my way through firstgreatwestern.co.uk - Train
Times - Timetable alterations & engineering works - leads me to a
PDF where a short paragraph informs "customers" the following:
"First Great Western services between London Paddington and Greenford
will not run. Alternative trains will run between London Paddington,
Acton Main Line, Ealing Broadway and West Ealing. No alternative
services will operate from Drayton Green, Castle Bar Park or South
Greenford. Customers travelling to / from these stations should use
local bus services. Customers travelling to / from Greenford should
use the Central Line on the London Underground system.

Back to NRE, and it turns out I should have consulted the "Engineering
work affecting Chiltern Railways between Monday 15 and Friday 19
August 2011" heading to find out the reason for the lack of Greenford
services - obviously!

I'm sure the closure was advertised well-enough locally (?), but the
information provided to any other passenger who doesn't walk past a
west London FGW station everyday appears rather shocking.

Do 2 Chiltern trains an hour really necessitate the suspension of the
Greenford trains (AFAIK they weren't even running up that branch, but
turning off at Acton?) Could FGW not have run a Hayes/Hanwell-
Greenford service (as they have done before e.g. Ladbroke Grove/lorry-
v-train incident at West Ealing)?

~cj

~cj