Great Western Coffee Shop

Posting in general "news" 'cos it's more personal.   

Just got home at the end of a long week of travelling around - been on 17 trains leased by 6 different operators.   Spoken with huge numbers of people from passengers who use the trains (and without whom there would be no need for a service) though the whole gambit of people who support that traffic - such as our TransWilts Volunteers through operational and management staff to directors, to other community groups and train operators and rail industry organisations, and to local government people from my home county and elsewhere, and to national government officers and a minister too.

I've attended twelve presentations (though not given any) and one award ceremony. I've carried an exhibition stand across the country and helped set it up and run it. I've watched a magician perform and learned how to make a dog out of balloons (and decided not to switch my career doing that). I've specified beginner, intermediate and advanced Python courses to run over a 16 day period, I've stripped hotel rooms, and I've provide breakfast for a whole hotel.  I've roughed out the design for a short-run trifold leaflet and had it printed - folding the first batch of 50 by hand and being relieved that the rest are delivered pre-folded.

I'm exhausted.   I will be around for emergencies - but please forgive me if I take the rest of the month off... and follow up with a news update and tell you more in October.   I'm going to take a walk with the dogs, get a Chinese takeaway, and put my feet up in front of the TV, watching a silly rom-com of the very first Christmas movies of the year.   If we have any alcohol in the house, I may even indulge a little.  Another of our number says I only drink when he's around, and I've been around him for some of the last 24 hours.

As I go off for (err) about 10 hours I close my eyes and recall the final highlights of the trip - speaking with a young person who lives in West Wiltshire and goes to college in Swindon - "This service is my lifeline - I couldn't go to college there without it" and walking through the 15:29 Chippenham departure to Westbury on its way to Melksham and counting no fewer than 77 passengers on board.    Testament not only to the team of volunteers, not only to the passengers, not only to the people who specify, run and arrange the trains - but testament to all of them.  A wonderful team and partnership - repeated elsewhere by other CRPs - and I suspect repeatable in a number of other places languishing as the TransWilts did prior to 2013.


Edited only to separate the list of member 'likes' here from grahame's original text - purely for clarity. CfN.

Just a few more hours then  ;)

To be fair you probably deserve to have October off as well, I'm sure it's busy enough running a business and a hotel, and then add on to that the amount of work you do with the Transwilts and West Wilts User Group etc. all in your own spare time. All the campaigning and advertising you (and your team) do and the positive results this has produced, namely increasing the Melksham service from 2 to 9 services per day and hopefully more to come over the next few years or so.

Not forgetting of course the time you spend hosting and running this wonderful forum for which many of us would be lost without. So please, be our guest, put your feet up, enjoy a drink or three and have some well deserved time off.  :)

Goodness, a full train in the middle of the afternoon.  Business really is booming.

And I think many of us will echo Adelante_CCT's  comments, which very eloquently sum up your contribution to so many things.

I used to think I crammed a lot into a day, then I met Graham and realised he did the equivalent of my day's work by mid-afternoon - and then carried on.

Just to add though it's a team effort at Well House Manor and having spent last night in the company of both Graham and Lisa, I know they are a great partnership and it was a pleasure to be with them - even if I do drive Graham to drink!  ;D

Happy October!     Thank you everyone for those kind words - an in fact I am away (and a very long way away) for a week in the middle of next month, visiting sister-in-law who lives on a different continent.   For the moment, however, back to a busy day following up some of the events of the last week with documentation and links. 

Key to the success of the TransWilts have been the passengers - yes, in larger numbers that most forecasts suggested. We have had a leaflet printed to explain a little about Thursday's announcement and what it means for the future, which I'm going to define as "once the service trial that's currently running on the TransWilts ends in December and over upcoming days I'll be spending a higher proportion of time than usual passing it out to passengers and answering question.  Leaflet at http://atrebatia.info/designation_leaflet_transwilts.pdf .  You may have noticed that I have not been panicking / stirring the pot about TransWilts trains beyond December, having had strong indications of where we're headed - it's good news though - as regulars will know - there are always some issues to resolve or try to resolve.

With networking, with an awards ceremony on Thursday evening that brought TransWilts one further pleasant surprise (and GWR a pleasant overall surprise too!), there is as you've identified a lot on my plate at the moment - and I have't even said "buses".  And as I travelled home, I spoke with / networked with / bumped into other where a follow up is going to be advantageous.   Others who were in Southport (or who wiremen but know) are so welcome to follow up on the forum and help inform, and please excuse me about a few things which, inevitably I fear, may fall between the cracks and about which I may need to be nagged.

I will ... in all seriousness .. be having some down time next month; just at the moment the flow of the happenings of the week gone, and the wanting to develop opportunities offered and to look after those key people - our passengers and wannabe passenger makes it hard for me to persuade myself to pause for too long.

Those numbers from - goodness, only yesterday - were seriously good.   When I got off the train in Melksham, I picked up some freshly printed leaflets which describe designation and the changes to the way the service will be run beyond December 10th (linked, but not the same thing) and I've been distributing them today - personally to say "thank you" to the wonderful team of staff Ive got to know on the train and along the line at the stations, and to the passengers many of whom I'm met before, and many who seem to know me from newspaper articles and the rest.  Very re-assuring to meet people who don't know me too, and when I ask them if they've heard about [...] fill me in with great and accurate detail.  It shows that the community really does take an interest and is effected by the line, even if that interest doesn't develop into active volunteer participation. It's lovely to meet new passengers as well - first time travellers discovering the line and saying "this is rather good" and to hear of new flows / reasons for people travelling by train.   I was marvelling at the cultural and background mix, and noting that the mix on the line is far more diverse than the perceived view of the mix in the towns in serves.

Anyway, as ever I was observing numbers; I'm going to note in shorthand (total number on the Trowbridge - Chippenham section / journeys to or from Melksham) with a note that Melksham traffic tends to be to / from Chippenham rather than to / from Trowbridge, and that the train is quieter on the outer ends - Westbury to Trowbridge and Chippenham to Swindon.

07:48 to Swindon: 31/13
09:46 to Swindon: 75/23
11:02 to Westbury: 23/9
11:48 to Swindon: 39/29
15:03 to Westbury: 38/10

I'm noting what look like weekday type figures on a wet Saturday, with Swindon Town playing away and just a very few people on the first train headed for their Shrewsbury game.    And I start doing risky arithmetic and come to the conclusion we're still growing.

 
What course does the Lumberjack Song appear in? What about the Dead Parrot module?  ;D

An act of the purest optimism to have posed the question in the first place !......

We can cover the use of modules such as Lumberjack on the intermediate or advanced courses which are tailored to cover third party modules.  http://lumberjack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html

Parrot is a module that we could, again, tailor to cover where clients are looking to work with Python in a web environment - it's a module that checks a server's response to 'get' requests and I would hope that the response from a working server is anything but dead. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/python-parrot/1.0.2

 ;D

I though that looked a bit odd ... missed out

09:02 to Westbury: 35/8

An average of 40 pax per train across those 6 services is seriously good for a pretty mediocre (weather-wise) October day with no obvious reason to enhance numbers.  And great to see such strong numbers from MKM, particularly on the northern journeys.

And look at the direction of change ... ;D ;D

May as well carry on here ... travelling on the trains today to update passengers and counter.

14:30 to Swindon: 23/7
15:39 to Westbury: 54/30
16:38 to Swindon: 40/12
18:03 to Westbury: 113/50
18:47 to Swindon: 19/8
19:14 to Westbury: 26/4
19:48 to Swindon: 9/3
20:32 to Westbury: 20/3

Wow! 50 ons and offs at MKM on the 1736 ex SWI.  And as you've previously mentioned, the earlier southbound train is loading really well too.

As it happens I was idly speculating just now how much (if stock was available, with no extra leasing costs incurred) it would cost to do one round trip. I reckon about £100 in crew, maybe £65 in fuel per vehicle, and a small amount on track access (maybe £4).  I have no idea of any marginal vehicle maintenance costs, but lets round it up to £200 per day. Or £50,000 a year. Am I on the right track?

So just to fill the gap between the 1549 and 1803 departures would not be cheap, and that's assuming a 1 car unit. 

You're probably in the right order of magnitude in the final figure - but as vehicles are "all day" products, and crews come in 8ish hour shifts, and there isn't (quite) a spare train lying around, throwing 50k at it directly wouldn't sort this issue.   

It is interesting to note the extra lunchtime trip that's been running since May and because that uses layover stock (not sure on crew rotas) many of the costs are there anyway.  And I look at the 2-car that parks in the bay at Swindon from 16:24 to 17:54 ... but that's something we've visited in the past and it hits just past the edge of robustness to get it out to Trowbridge and back (where it couldn't reverse at the platform anyway); even swapping with the set that is on layover at Westbury from 16:33 to 17:11 doesn't quite work. There's lots of other trains around ... the best solution I've seen looses the 17:28 Warminster to Worcester Shrub Hill as far as Westbury and that's robbing Peter to pay Paul. There's a potential bigger picture solution to that one if / when a train coming up from Salisbury calls at Warminster at 17:38, but the ripples go on, and I haven't even started on crew - just on trains.

Adding a train / carriage to the fleet just for the peak (and remember we're in the swansong of 153s in our area) doesn't add up - even with London commuter trains, the parking up overnight in Hastings and during the day at Grove Park is (I think) a thing of the past.  So I suspect that after finding all the layovers that can be used, the ongoing solution is in something which plugs other gaps too; quoting Melksham times, you have 07:49 to 10:04 northbound, and 06:38 to 09:15 southbound.  If you fill the 07:49 to 10:04 gap, you really need to fill the evening gap where I started in the first place, otherwise the 17:36 off Swindon becomes even more crowded.

Thanks Graham. I was speculating on the absolute minimum cost given marginal use of resources, but as you point out so well, there are many reasons why funding is just part of the issue.  It looks as though numbers are now averaging around 40 per train (the 8 chosen appear fairly representative of the total, with peak flow only in one direction), so double the original target.

Only a few more passengers and the evening peak train will be in danger of appearing in the DfT's most crowded trains top 10!

Yes - though only 101 on at the same time (Chippenham to Melksham); the 50 changeover there was 38 off and 12 on.  I still wonder how East Midlands trains got 169 on a 153 into Lincoln according to their local paper - I thought they were called "153"s because that's the absolute limit  ;D