If FGW▸ get rid of 12 x 158s and in place get 5 x 14xs then I wouldn't be surprised if the Melksham line gets axed as these trains are needed on far busier parts of the network! Sorry to disapprove but I can see where FGW are coming from when they have little resources (although it is their fault in fairness) although I have seen a number of these trains and they are virtually empty and from what I hear many others are wedged. If the 1/2 carriages used on the Melksham line could go elsewhere it wouild solve many problems. The ideal solution to melksham is to have a private or Open Acces operator to run it as FGW obviously are not interested.
Hi, Liam.
Many thanks for posting this, as it gives me an excellent opportunity to correct one or two misconceptions, and to answer questions that others who are not familiar with the "TransWilts" line may be asking themselves too. I fear this may be a long one!
As things stand at the moment,
withdrawing the current trains that run between Swindon, Chippenham, Melksham, Trowbridge and Westbury would NOT release any resources for use elsewhere at a time they would be needed. The line is at present, technically, run without a train; I have seen the wording "marginal time" used, and what that means is that the trains are run off-peak in the extreme. The availabilty of trains that aren't doing anything else is the governing factor, and NOT the times that passengers want to travel - in effect, the customer being served is the
DfT» who require two round trips a day (but Northbound ONLY on Sunday) and whist they gave some timing guidance to FGW on timing, they were willing to relax even that when asked. FGW do not see the passenger as their primary customer.
There is bound to be a very low ridership on a train service that runs at a time that is extreme off-peak and does not offer round trip (commute) options. Here is a graph that shows the times that trains start out on journeys and the relative loading - I have superimposed the start times of the TransWilts trains on the DfT's graph to put this line and the service it gets in context.
Let's put that into context. How busy is the 06:35 Exeter to Exmouth? (I choose that line because, I think, you're from Devon, Liam, and because it's a line that Andrew Griffiths of FGW often uses for comparison purposes when talking to us about the TransWilts). And how busy would it be if the only two return trips back up from Exmouth were the 07:15 and the 19:20? And how busy would it be if, missing the 06:35 you had to wait for the 18:47? My informed guess is that this skeleton service would be pretty empty.
When you look into it, the timing BEFORE the morning and AFTER the evening peak is even more stupid than a service that runs before or after each peak would be. At least a service before or after each peak would allow for a normal working day for people who could be flexible. But with an arrival in Swindon BEFORE the government-required time of 08:00, and a departure back that doesn't leave until after half past six, the working day cannot easily be slid to fit.The timing and frequency of trains is key to their use and it is not a fair comparison to look at the utilisation of a twice-a-day service and extrapollate the figures to give you the alternative results for a train every 2 hours.
Journey figures for the TransWilts well exceeded 100,000 journeys per annum in the last couple of years on just 5 round trips a day, compared to an estimated 8,000 journeys for this year based on the current two trips. That is real evidence of the sensitivity of the loading of a train service to the timing and frequency with which it runs.
But
we need to look at future travel requirements and not back to the past in order to formulate an appropriate service. West Wiltshire - Warminster, Westbury, Trowbridge and Melksham - are growing rapidly and set to continue to grow for the next 20 years. Add in Frome - part of the same rail-connected group but just over the border in Somerset - and you have five towns with a strong commute requirement to Swindon, to Chippenham. From Swindon and Chippenham, there are travel requirements to Salisbury and to West Wiltshire. By bus, journey times are dreadful - 95 minutes Swindon to Trowbridge (v 35 minutes by train), and over 2 hours from Swindon to Salisbury (a train can do that in 70 minutes). And try working out Salisbury to Chippenham, or Melksham to Westbury by bus if you have a few minutes to spare - I bet you'll be shocked. By train with a "dogleg", change in Bath - you'll be equally shocked to find that Swindon to Salisbury takes the same 2 hours that the bus takes. The road network on the corridor is already saturated (and when the Westbury bypass is built, the consultants tell us there will be an extra 42% HGVs above natural growth added to the A350 through villages and towns to the North). In recent history, with a stable service of just 5 trains each way daily, ridership on the TransWilts line grew at between 10% and 35% per annum (compound, depending on which measures you look at) and all the data that I have points to this being a long term pattern that would have been sustained if the train service had been left unaltered - the market was far from saturated, and demographic and other changes would have boosted rather than depressed its use.
Having had the very worst - the shit end - of the timetable changes in 2006, I fail to see why we should take the butt yet again of the failure of [whoever] to specify the resources necessary to run a proper service. Pulling the TransWilts services would not (as Liam has suggested) release a train for use elsewhere - it would simply add to the misery and depression caused by the lack of a decent service here. And
restoring an appropriate service on the TransWilts would be the very best use of the additional "143" resources. Elsewhere, you'll see people writing that they don't want these trains on their lines. Hereabouts, you'll find a welcoming home for one of them and - mark my words - in 2 years time it would be packed to overcrowding.
FootnotesOn Open Access: Nice idea .. has been looked at in some detail. Issues involve the heavy admin / cost of doing this on a single-train service, depots, etc. Also note discouraging "trade off" type fines if the open access operator delayed one of FGW's precious 125s, and the lack of co-operation that First would provide at their stations. We saw this up to April 2006 at Swindon, with FGW staff actively obstructing the use of the Wessex Train service.
On resources: FGW are trying to have their cake and eat it; they got caught in a Dutch auction of "how few trains can we run a service on", and bid so low that they can't cope. I'm glad to see them putting their hands in their pockets and buying five EXTRA trains (where did that figure come from?) as that will mean that they will be able to provide a more robust service - assuming they continue to lease up to the limits set for that. Driver resources are also raised as a question sometimes, with it taking a year to train new drivers. Since the frachise has been running for 15 months, they should easily have any new drivers they had to take on up and running by December '07.
On "FGW obviously not interested": Actually, I think they ARE interested in running the service - although they would probably be first to admit that they're more concerned as getting as best possible a financial bung out of the DfT and
WCC▸ (Wiltshire County Council) as they can in order to do so. [Other example - Severn Beach line]
