Update From Great Western Railway

Great Western Railway have advised Henley Trains:

“You will have seen the Prime Minister’s announcement on Sunday night, and as you know we have been working with industry partners, with the Department for Transport and with stakeholders like yourselves, so that we are ready to start uplifting capacity and service levels when the time comes.   

We will have an amended timetable in place from next Monday (18 May). The new timings have been uploaded and are now showing in online journey planners.  We will be supporting national announcements about the changes tomorrow, but wanted you to have advance notice.  It is also worth noting that as well as the changes in timing, we are increasing capacity with more nine, ten and twelve carriages services.  The overall message remains the same however, and Government advice is to avoid train travel whenever possible. 

Customers will still need to check the timetable weekly for a bit longer as we continue to accommodate infrastructure improvement work and may also add further services in the light of changes to government guidance for our customers.  We are also developing advice and messages for customers based on Government guidance and again we will keep you updated. 

We anticipate that there will be further phases of timetable improvement as the lockdown ease such as, further changes to support a return of educational establishments.  

We are really grateful for your help so far, and we would welcome any further local insight that you might have on the revised timetable or the operation of services.  Please note that social distancing continues to have an impact on the number of trains that we can maintain and get into service each day including, critically, making sure that they receive additional levels of cleaning.  Although the levels of absence from Covid-19 have dropped, we also need to take account of continuing levels of absence when we are planning on what we can reliably provide.”

For more information and to share ideas please contact henleytrains@gmail.com