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My first official measure - Passenger Entrys and Exits - revisited 9 years later

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2014-12-05 18:09:52 - Graham Ellis

When I first got involved in looking at the use of the train services on the Chippenham - Trowbridge stretch, I asked for data and the Office of Rail Regulation told me that the best indicator they could give me was passenger numbers at Melksham. So it's with interest I look at those figures when they're published on an annual basis, even though I have since learned a great deal about their vagaries, and that Melksham only accounts for a minority of the traffic, with major travel requirements from Westbury and Trowbridge to Chippenham and Swindon.

Figures for the year to 31st March 2013 were 12080. That was on the previous poor service ... the servive was improved in mid December 2013, giving 8.5 months of that inappropriately poor service, and 3.5 months of a service improved to an appopriate, if still-skinny, level in the figures to 31st March 2014, published yesterday. And the journeys rose to 23930. What does that mean?

There were around 1000 journeys a month in the previous year, and if that carried on for 8.5 months (I have no reason to doubt that it did) until the mid December 2013 improvements, it would have then had to run at 4400 journeys per month for the end of December, and January through March. That's not a bad start to the new services.

Closer analysis tells me to bear in mind that (a) there could have been an early surge in interest in those first few months, trying out something new and (b) those first three, winter, months are likely to be quiet on leisure traffic and (c) it take time to publicise, build up and have word of month spread the news and (d) it takes a significant time for people's habits and homes and jobs to change and (e) the Rail Link Bus in Melksham only started in late February, 2 months after the trai service so the effect of that is minimal in these figures. Also (in these notes) I don't know of any significant distortions in ticketing, which we had a few years back, and I think the publicshed figures and change are a realistic measure.

I caught the 07:19 train to Swindon this morning. I arrived at the station in good time. Quiet - just me and another bloke. But then the Melksham Rail Link bus arrived with more passengers. And some were dropped off, walked up, down themselves us. And by the time the train came in just "one or two" had swollen to 13, joining 40 already on the train from Westbury and Trowbridge to make 53 up to Chippenham - remember our target average of 20, and that it's the train half an hour later that's really the "peak" one and likely to be even busier.

All in all, a very pleasing morning - and a good meeting with my contact at First Great Western in Swindon (the point of my trip) ... giving thought to marketing and carrying passengers through various special events and engineering changes which we know we have in the summer of 2015. In a nutshell, there are operation reasons we won't have a perfect service (or anything close) while Box tunnel is closed for six weeks to have the track lowered for electrification, but where things can be tuned to help the TransWilts, they will be - one or two cases of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear indeed!