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Officially overcrowded in the first year

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2014-11-15 22:55:42 - Graham Ellis

Officially overcrowded in the first year! This afternoon, a "typical" Saturday in November, I returned from Swindon on the 17:46 trsin to Melksham ... and found it to be carrying 116 passengers on a 78 seat train. That's not bad going for a train service that didn't exist last year, and one that's only running as a "trial service" to see whether or not it works.



Numbers were swollen because Swindon Town had a home match (but then they do that on 20 Saturdays per year, so it's not unusual) and perhaps by a few more passengers than usual going up to do shopping - early for Christmas. South of Chippenham, there were still around 100 people on the train too - that's the strategically inportant section of the line as the TransWilts service makes a big difference there, not just providing an alternative way. And on Mondays to Fridays too, the equivalent train from Swindon (17:36, sometimes 17:38) has more passengers on it than seats.



Looking ahead, January through March are always quieter times for leisure travel, and in order to assist train uptake further we'll be providing an information and marketing push for the services, and looking to emphasise services which aren't quite so busy as the 17:36 / 17:38 / 17:46 ... though actually it's rare to find any train carrying less passengers than the CRP's third year target of 20 passengers per train on the uniquely-served Chippenham to Trowbridge section. I'm fairly confident, though, that our seasonal dip wil be far less pronounced than on many of the lines we compare ourselves with - entirely due to the geography of our area and the metrics of our user base, which means that we have a much more productive patch to promote in.

I am reminded of Terry Machen's song and video on Youtube, from "way back", in the dark days of the last decade when train carriages had been cut so that overcrowding was routine. Would I have expected technically overcrowded TransWilts trains this year? Not really, but then neither am I surprised that we have the occasional one. A certain number standing for a short journey is acceptable - indeed there were one or two seats on the train that no-one had 'bothered' to use, and really the "official" overcrowding was by no more than a dozen people or so; 148% load, where 140% is the supposed limit. And we could always do it on a "special" - one of Terry's