Our day trip by train from Swindon, Chippenham and Melksham to Weymouth
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2013-05-28 12:56:46 - Graham Ellis
Lovely day in Weymouth...
The train was just right - nearly every seat take, but not overcrowded. A great day had by all. Thank you to First Great Western, their team, and the TransWilts team for helping it to happen, and to all the people who came along for making it worthwhile for us to have organised.
As you see, the train was busy... however, we did get one complaint that there wasn't enough publicity ahead of time, and other lacking information too. It would have been very easy for us to overpromote the trip... I'm adding my reply to the correspondent here to help explain why this fabulous opportunity wasn't shouted from all the rooftops.
Firstly, I'm sorry that you learned about the opportunity to visit Weymouth by train so late in the day. I'm not sure if you joined us in the end - if you did, I hope you had a good day; if not, I'll give you some pointers later in this email that will help you hear about the opportunities earlier.
Thank you for getting in touch with your suggestions. You're correct in suggesting that we (at the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership) could have advertised the service much more widely, and generated additional interest. However, we had a limited resource to work with and needed to ensure that we didn't end up with so many people wishing to travel that people had an uncomfortable journey, or turned up at Swindon / Chippenham / Melksham station for a day out at the seaside and couldn't even get on the train. And we also had to consider platform overcrowding issues at Melksham, and the loadings on the other legs of the services we were advertising through the day, all of which were public trains with other regular passenger traffic using them too.
The train in the morning from Melksham to Westbury had nearly every seat taken in the end. The evening train back from Weymouth was very crowded with a few people standing, and the Westbury to Melksham / Chippenham / Swindon service left Westbury with a few people standing too - but happy at the end of the day and not overcrowded. At Melksham station in the morning, we were able to handle the crowd safely, but we did have to move people all along the platform to achieve that, and at both ends of the day the train arrived there on time, but left a few minutes late due to the numbers. We really couldn't have wished for the numbers to be any better - these people had a great day out, and we didn't have to disappoint anyone who turned up. More importantly, we were able to illustrate that with minimal advertising, we're able to bring substantial numbers of people onto train services on the line.
I would love to see a time when we could advertise days out very widely - secure in the knowledge that there would be sufficient capacity to cope. And the real way to do that is to offer the service on a regular / frequent basis, so that the clear pent-up demand can be spread out. The proposal in the Great Western franchise was to run 8 services each way per day between Swindon and Westbury, and with a specific requirement to have one of the summer Sunday services make a good connection to Weymouth. Station improvement funding, and seed funding for the service growth is in place, and we await the resolution of interim arrangements which replace the franchising for the next couple of years. I am hopeful, but cannot be certain, that we'll be able to offer something rather better in 2014.
Let me move on to your question about the "Bus Pass Scheme". My understanding is that it's a trial on the Westbury to Weymouth section only, so at the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership we're only aware of it on the periphery. You'll probably get a more specific and detailed answer from the Heart of Wessex Partnership, or from First. But I did note yesterday that the big posters advertising the scheme on Westbury station are still in place as they have been for a while, and it seems logical to me for this scheme to be advertised in area (i.e. at Westbury) rather than out of area, where advertising space could be best given over to things local to Chippenham or Swindon.
Finally, I promised you some pointers for information.
1. Train times (including all the trains we used) are available three months ahead online - if you go to almost any train company's site and look for a journey (try "buy a ticket"), you'll be able to find out the recommended routes for your trip, and prices too - you're not committed to buying tickets if you just go and look at what's on offer in this way. From Swindon and Chippenham to Weymouth, there are practical alternative options on most Saturdays, and also on Mondays to Fridays but those may be rather more expensive as you may want to travel in the morning peak.
2. The rail partnership has a web site at http://www.twcrp.org.uk - although that's very much biased towards service improvement and managing that rather than advertising days out at present.
3. Take a look at http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshp - that's an independent site by train passengers and for train passengers, where a great deal of interesting data can be found and you can add you own questions and opinions - and you can help provide answers too.
4. Telephone enquiry systems, and staff at your local staffed station, can help too. Please don't ask the staff seeing the trains off or operating them when they're busy at that job - but booking office staff, and the others in gaps between their safety work, are usually very helpful indeed.
Please forgive the long answer here - it gives me an opportunity to write up some of the issues and metrics from yesterday for our own team of volunteers (we're all volunteers at the CRP, to whom you wrote!) so that we can take a look at what we do and say "is it right" in the light of customer, or potential customer, feedback such as yours.
