with a Melksham bias - Office of Road and Rail

So passenger numbers at Melksham Station have dropped from 63,350 in the year 2023/24 to 60,930 in the year 2024/25.
Disappointing when passenger numbers across the UK^▸ have increase by 7% over the year.
Why might the Melksham figure have fallen?

1. Trains were good as suspended during engineering works at Westbury from 24th December 2024 to 24th January 2025. Without that suspension, passenger journeys would have been just over 66,000. Replacement buses ran well in the circumstances, but a bus service taking several times as long as the train is no substitute, and only a tiny proportion of people used them.

2. When the services did run, they were very much prone to cancellation. If you look at ((this thread)) where we kept an eye on performance you'll find no less that 808 posts for 2024 - and we are up to 772 already this year. This reflects an ongoing issue with cancellations, and it's little wonder that people don't buy tickets for trains that aren't running. The cancellation rate on-the-day is in excess of 10%, and that does not take into account the engineering works mentions in (1) just above

3. Community promotion of Melksham’s train service has been muted last year and this. Whilst the service has been useable for regular passengers who know what they are doing and have a “Plan B” and understanding boss, we at MTUG^» have been very limited is suggesting try-it-out trips with the risk of people being disappointed and put off for years. And I have not seen any general promotions in our area from Community Rail. In hindsight, the sad decisions not to market were correct, bearing in mind some of the stories I have heard.

I am actually amazed at how robust the figures are. That's probably because Melksham's train service provides a lifeline to many of its users - it is nothing like as much a leisure / optional market here as it is in so many other places.

From April this year until November, reliability issues were serious with far too many cancellations, and with trains declared as cancelled but then re-instated - sometimes with little or no notice, and running nearly empty. So the figures we see next year are also likely to be disappointing. However, the problems are at long last being noticed, it appears, by people who have some ability to give us a level playing field and I would hope to see them improve. Having said which, 60,000 journeys is still twenty times the numbers given to me of around 3,000 when I first asked "how many people use Melksham Station". We are up from ten to two hundred journeys a day.

Numbers should be far higher. And there is opportunity. Once people have a product that is useful and they can rely on. At 9 trains a day each way, it is useful but thin. It's the reliability that's needed back - with the provision of an appropriate alternative on the very rare occasions when things go wrong. I hope we don't hear "oops - we've not got a driver" or "oops - we've not actually got a working train" in 2026!

From a Facebook post:

Quote

From the Office of Rail and Road, published 4 December 2025

"Estimates of station usage April 2024 to March 2025"

"In Great Britain, 2,589 stations were served by mainline rail services as at 31 March 2025, including six new stations which opened during the year."

"A total of 1,730 million passenger rail journeys were made between April 2024 and March 2025. This is an increase of 7% from the 1,610 million journeys made in the previous year (April 2023 to March 2024)."

What do the statistics show for our home town of Melksham? Here are the figures published for the last 28 years to those just published for the year from April 2024 to March 2025, showing a fall of 3000 journeys. Analysis to follow

Melksham - station code MKM^▸ - Wiltshire

1997 to 2000   3868   3388   3635
2000 to 2005   3266   13695   19143   23294e   27446
2005 to 2010   24426   22001   38081   27656   10028
2010 to 2015   11046   11326   12080   23930   51858
2015 to 2020   60676   74666   74220   74534   75292
2020 to 2025   18800   52342   64206   63350   60930

e - estimated by myself not the ORR^»

https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/msigcn24/station-usage-2024-25-statistical-release.pdf