Transport for Wales provide SMS messages to notify of disruption in timetabled services. You can sign up for this here:
https://www.journeycheck.com/tfwrail/
There are options for the time of day, stations and direction.
We have been monitoring the messages for some time with a view to understand what is happening on the line, So we record the messages for Crewe Shrewsbury all day and for both directions.
You can see the list of messages for January 2021 here
We have made a simple analysis of these and the table is below.
There were 101 messages in January for 63 events. Where a number of messages cover the same event, this is counted as one. We have pragmatically allocated the responsible party between TfW, NR and others, so far as this is possible. This is not exact, because we do not have full information. An example is level crossing incidents, where we presume this is an NR issue. But it could have been a road strike. We have not attempted to define the severity of the events.
From this we can see that more than half of the events in January (65%) are problems for NR with line side equipment and signal failures.predominating.
We will start to add other months forward and back, to see what the trends are.
We have updated the table after doing the data for February
Data for January 2021
| Total | NR | TfW | other | |
| track NR | 1 | 1 | ||
| level crossing NR | 4 | 4 | ||
| line-side equipment NR | 13 | 13 | ||
| obstruction on track NR | 2 | 2 | ||
| flooding the railway NR | 4 | 4 | ||
| points failure NR | 3 | 3 | ||
| speed restriction NR | 3 | 3 | ||
| signalling system NR | 11 | 11 | ||
| train TfW | 10 | 10 | ||
| train crew TfW | 2 | 2 | ||
| late / timetable TfW | 3 | 3 | ||
| passengers | 1 | 1 | ||
| trespassers on the railway | 4 | 4 | ||
| bridge strike | 2 | 2 | ||
| Total | 63 | 41 | 15 | 7 |
| 65% | 24% | 11% |
