These days the various journey planners are my lifeline. With an infrequent bus and train service I now have to plan my journeys so I'm not sitting for ages on a platform somewhere. I quite often find that the journey planners will give me different routes to get to the same place. Not necessarily a choice of routes but if I leave at a particular time I'll need to go via X, If I go an hour later I may need to change at Y instead.
Excellent advise. An integration with real time information so that it knows about any delays / cancellations and can allow for them (sometimes a delay is a gained connection and makes a journey quicker) and the fares system (to tell you what to to with your tickets) would be Utopia.
Sorry to hear about your strife, Graham. I must say even when there appears to be a robust and frequent train service, it is only when you get down to actually using it that you realise its weaknesses. Returning from Paignton yesterday I had to kill 55 minutes for a connection to Yatton at Taunton, on top of a 20 minute wait at Exeter. The train in the opposite direction was a through one and took about 2hrs 10. Coming back it was 3hrs 20min. True I didn't have to resort to a bus and it is good that the services are regular to Yatton even til quite late. It's the connections that are nearly always the issue for anything other than the main hubs.
When I mentioned the timings to someone who never considers public transport, I was patronisingly smiled at as being eccentric for even thinking about it.
Indeed - it's often the connections. To me (personally) they're less of a problem than they used to be; I remember n my childhood getting REALLY bored waiting half an hour (I was a bit impatient). But these days, I have a laptop and stuff to do, I will take a break as an opportunity to eat and drink - and of course the time taken to observe helps educate me into how things work, and that helps here and with associated transport activities.
The TransWilts service introduced in December 2013 didn't have connections as the highest of priorities. First was finding paths for the trains without upsetting anything else. Second was operationally keeping the trains separate from other trains so that they can be withdrawn when they don't sell with minimal fuss. Third was to make them operationally easy. Fourth was to get the timings such that they provided the best possible timings for the peak on the busiest forecast peak flow. Fifth was to put in a nice even(isn) service after (4). And sixth was making connections work. That may seem / sound a bit unfair, but there's logic to it. It's no lack of wanting connections to work - it's just other priorities and then see what falls out.
I'm very happy to report some changes now that the service has proven itself. In particular "keeping it operationally separate" has faded, and the Sunday service - on which this causes some real funnies - has been integrated with the existing trains allowing us to step up from a three-hourly service to a two-hourly. It's also allowed a service to carry on to Frome to help fill a gap there.
From December, a departure just 2 minutes earlier form Swindon (15:14 to 15:12) makes for a much faster journey, the train now arriving in Westbury ahead of rather than behind the Portsmouth Harbour train. Operationally, it adds a shunt. Connection wise it gains an hour on Chippenham - Salisbury journeys.
Excellent! . No change though to the 08:49 from Swindon on Monday to Friday which we would like to see back to 08:36 (as it is on Saturday); one assumes that the MOD or their agents still require that path for the VERY occasional train ...
