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Like a bathroom company with no plumbers

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-07-04 08:40:50 - Graham Ellis

If I ran a bathroom installation company, I would have chippies, plasterers, tilers, laboureres and plumbers to help me. Customers would be looking for a complete job, and if I was missing any one trade - say I had no plumbers - then the rest of my team would be pretty idle with only the occasional oddball job that didn't happen to need plumbers to do it.

Transport is all about a co-operative network too. On Sunday, I was on the evening train from Westbury to Swindon, and it looked like this:




And, in contrast, here's what it looked like on a summer evening last year:




Why the big difference? It's nothing to do with the evening - it's all about the morning service and whether (potential) customers have a complete product. Last summer, they did.

One of the reasons I'm so excited about the news that the Local Sustainable Transport Fund, and Wiltshire Council, are putting some 5 million pounds into improving Wiltshire's Rail offering is that they're looking at a complete picture and not purely fixing the lack of a useful train service. They're making sure that the pieces join up and that - to use tha bathroom analogy - all services are in place to make for a complete service.

One of the reasons I'm pretty certain that the new service will succeed is that for many journeys it's the missing link. It's the plumber I was missing in my original analogy. The trains pictured above are standard, scheduled services from summer 2011 and summer 2012. They run anyway. The difference is that the extra component, some 8 hours earlier, was there last year which ensured that the result later in the day was used. Alas, this summer in the pictures above you're seeing the knockon effect.

So - look at what's coming. And don't look just as the passengers using it. Look also at the bus passengers connecting and their support to buses which for the most part are running already. Look at the onwards passenger connections. I wasn't using the TransWilts train on Sunday just to get to Swindon; I carried on to London, via the Underground and then another train to Cambridge. And it can be well argued that the Melksham to Swindon leg of such a journey shouldn't be evaluated purely on that leg from a railway business case - the question to be asked is not "how much is paid for journeys on this train", but "how much money for public transport travel is raised as a result of this train running". My return trip to Cambridge costs £60.00 . My fare to Chippenham (the section the train uniquely runs) would have been £3.40 .

Looking at services in isolation is a mistake that's been made before - you end up cutting back the uneconomic end time and time again until nothing remains. Thank goodness that's now understood better. And thank goodness that our forthcoming service fills in so many gaps that it will be in demand - in fact, last summer we proved such high demand that we overcrowded. With 8 extra trains a day, rather than 8 extra trains over the whole summer, we'll be able to grow that demand, cope with it, and have the full connectional infrastructure to handle it comfortably.