The 18:30 from Temple Meads to Paddington comes from Weston-super-Mare. If it's on time, it leaves there at about 18:05. My office is 5 minutes from Temple Meads so if I'm getting the 18:30, I'll tend to leave at about 18:20 so that I can take a leisurely stroll to the station and perhaps pick up a copy of Amatuer Ranter from Smith's. Before I leave, I check the "live departure boards" which as you probably know are available from the National Rail website, and in fetching pink livery direct from Third Rate Western's site (which presumably runs slowly on a repainted ZX81 server).
At 18:15, if the train hasn't left Weston yet, there isn't a hope in hell of it getting to Temple Meads by 18:30. So why the hell does the live departure board say "On time"? Surely it's not beyond the wit of man to program it to know that if a train hasn't left it's starting point 10-15 minutes after it was meant to, it ain't going to be "on time" at the next station, even taking into account Third Rate Western's hugely padded timetables.
In fact, the 18:30 ended up pulling into Temple Meads a clear 28 minutes late due to the fun and games at Southall earlier. It didn't leave Weston until 18:40. At which time, the lovely live departure boards were still optimistically predicting that we would be on our way out of Bristol at 18:49. Unlikely, but perhaps it's nice to think the glass is half full when in fact it's got half an inch of warm lager and three fag ends in it.
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You should probably be aware that National Rail's Live Departure Boards are not 100% accurate at all times and therefore shouldn't be fully relied upon as if it were the Gospel of train times. There is a link shown on the Live Departure Boards' pages that quite well explains this in detail...in-fact here is said link; http://tinyurl.com/krzcf9 (shorted with thanks to tinyurl.com to make it visibly fit in this blog comment)
You can call National Rail Enquiries on 08457 48 49 50 to check the latest (perhaps as you're walking to the station) or even use their WAP site, which is wap.nationalrail.co.uk, on your mobile since this would cost less than phoning them up (the pages are very basic text-only content so data charges are negligible) however it may not be as updated as their telephone operators are.
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