The last Sunday HST from London to Carmarthen?

On Saturday 18th May 2019, GWR (formerly First Great Western) ran its last full-length High Speed Train services, thereby ending nearly 43 years of frontline service of this remarkable stock. Although I would admit to being a railway enthusiast, I am mostly out of touch with the current scene and would have been oblivious to this event unless I happened to catch it on the news -- when it would have been too late!

However, it turned out that a friend of mine regularly drops off his copies of The Railway Magazine, and I read the April 2019 issue which had a brief comment about the last day of HSTs on the Great Western. Since I live within earshot (when the weather obliges) of the Great Western main line through the Vale of White Horse, and HSTs have been a familiar local feature for nearly as long as I can remember, I felt I needed to make the effort to witness some of the final runs. This is what I was able to see and record. (I should also note that this is a place where HSTs were in their natural element, working at speeds they were designed for.)

Thanks to the resources of the Internet, I was able to discover (a) what services would be diagrammed for HSTs on which day, and (b) when they were likely to come through. Luckily, I had remembered to check things on Saturday 11th May: there was still a week to go. Indeed, no HSTs were scheduled through the Vale on this day, but there was a Paddington to Camarthen (and return) service the next day. The estimated passing times were most convenient, it was a beautiful spring weekend, and I had no other hard commitments. This sounded like a plan! The site www.125group.org.uk provided me with information about general HST diagrams (which train services an HST set would operate on a given day), and the site railforums.co.uk had more up-to-date news and comments about the specific HST sets and the services they would be operating.

Therefore, these images are the result of my two excursions on Sunday 12th May -- less than a week to go before the last scheduled HST services. I chose the two foot crossings near me, where the public right-of-way crosses the mainline. (I was not somewhere I was not supposed to be.) Remarkably, despite the crossings being well-used, no-one else had joined me to watch these trains go by (unlike the following Saturday), so these photos must be unique. The first shows the 11:33 service (train 1B28) from London Paddington to Carmarthen, with the retro-liveried power car 43185 trailing. The second photo shows this same HST power car leading on the 16:55 service (train 1L90) from Carmarthen to London Paddington. The last image is the trailing HST power car 43009, passing the site of Williams Grand Prix Engineering to the right, out of shot.


I will miss these trains. I have always liked them. There was something thrilling about hearing the approaching, distant throb of two power cars at speed, working hard, getting closer and closer. And then the explosive roar as the leading power car passed by, followed by the whoosh of eight Mark 3 coaches, and then the roar again of the trailing power car. As the sound then rapidly faded into the distance, the tranquility of rural Oxfordshire would return and birdsong could be heard again. All that remained was the waft of diesel exhaust. Magic!