Cheltenham Festival - G&WR

Cheltenham Festival starts today which I really must get round to attending one day. First Great Western are running quite a few extra trains - but they'll still be rammed!

Just wondering why G&WR only run one train each day for the meeting. I would have thought this would be an opportunity for the line to come into it's own and perform a proper public transport function.

This isn't intended to be a go at the line - I'm just interested as when I go I'd like to arrive be steam!

 

Could it be to avoid frightening the horses? =P~

 

The trains are actually run/chartered by a separate company http://www.classichospitality.co.uk/ I guess they don't think it viable to run more than the one. They have been doing it for a few years now so I think they must have a good idea of the market.

 

BillR is quite right; the Cheltenham Gold Cup Event and also the November Race meetings at Cheltenham are served by G&WR trains under a separate franchise. As far as I'm aware, they are very successful and I must go myself by train one day having been born in Cheltenham but never yet attended the Gold Cup (the shame!). The Race Course Station on the outskirts of Cheltenham opened in 1912 , some time after the rest of the line had been completed and remained open for race train specials long after other passenger services had been withdrawn. However,after the Honeybourne Line closed in 1976 its fate was sealed until it reopened as the new southern terminus of the G&WR in 2003. Since then, it has proved to be a very useful asset to the line but not as useful as Cheltenham Malvern Road Station in the town itself could have been if it hadn't been knocked down! I think Autotank has a very good point regarding the re-introduction of race specials and when the G&WR is reconnected to the National Network at Honeybourne I'm sure that this will happen. As Cheltenham Race Course is not a "flat" course it has a winter season which is useful for keeping the railway punters coming all year round. As I've said before on another thread, heritage railways will only have a long-term future if they can do the job they were built to do originally - not just to be a recreation of a time long gone. However, the beauty is that you can combine nostalgia and tradition with real transport provision - just get the empty Honda factory at Swindon to start building 82xxxs!

 

It is a great shame that the Network Rail (I think or was it some transport group?) plan of diverting stopping trains from Lansdown Jnc along the GWR formation through Cheltenham, almost up to Hunting Butts tunnel, then building a new line the 1/2 mile to rejoin the LMS at Swindon Village doesn't look like it will come to anything. Otherwise The G&WR would only be a hundred yds from a mainline connection.