The arrival of the 6.03 a.m. First Great Western service at Cheltenham Spa's train station usually sees more than two dozen passengers make that familiar last-minute dash from the platform to grab a good seat for the journey to London. Some of the passengers head for first class; others might sit further down the train in the smoking compartments ready to face a day at work in the capital.
Yesterday, after the horror of the Paddington crash, there were only 13 people standing on the platform at Cheltenham Spa and some spoke of the familiar faces of other passengers that were no longer there.
"I know some of the people who could have been on it and I just hope they are OK," said Mr John White, a business development executive. "I should have been on it but my meeting was cancelled. I travel on this service every week and you get to know the faces."
The platform team manager for Wales and West Trains, Mr Geoff Gillman, was on the station platform on Tuesday morning when the "regulars" boarded the Great Western Train headed for London: "I think everyone is just so shocked. Most of our regulars catch a later train, but there were still a lot of people on there who you see every day. You know the faces and you just hope they're all OK."
Further down the line at Cheltenham, another passenger was adamant that his fear about rail safety would not stop him from travelling on the train. Mr Michael Hayden, from Cheltenham, said: "It's terrible but you've just got to get on with it and get on the train."
And at Reading, where the doomed Great Western Train picked up its final passengers on Tuesday, a grim reminder that many who boarded the train did not get off was found in the carpark. Usually there would be about 50 cars in the car-park in the early morning, but yesterday there were more than 100 cars still waiting for their owners to return.
At one of London's busiest stations, Eltham, several passengers told reporters they were fed up with the rail operators putting profit before safety.
Ms Fiona Hadler, a dental nurse, said: "I never feel safe getting on a train. I'd rather be on a plane. They cram us all in together like sardines, rattle us up to London on old tracks and then have to keep stopping every so often because there are obviously too many trains using the same lines.
"These private train companies are playing with people's lives in the pursuit of money," Ms Hadler said.
Another passenger said the rail companies were "clouded by their greediness" and angrily denounced the government for failing to implement the Automatic Train Protection (ATP) scheme on all trains in Britain.
"Yesterday's crash obviously happened because there are too many trains and the safety system is not equipped to cope with them. They should be investing money immediately in making the railway network safe," he said.
And several callers to a London radio phone-in programme yesterday said they had decided to take the car to work rather than their normal train because the Paddington crash was fresh in their memories and they feared travelling on the train.
One man said he had driven to work in London "because after this crash, I just don't feel safe any more. It was a hassle driving in, but it's better than the train at the moment."