An interesting exercise to see how passenger numbers to GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) termini have grown from 2005 (blue) to2025 (red).  Some branch lines have significant intermediate traffic, in one or two cases dwarfing the terminus.  Others have very limited intermediate traffic.  So the growth may be the thing to compare and not the absolute numbers

I agree with you.  So how do we do the right thing now?

Some Population comparisons:
Minehead - 12,000
St Ives, Cornwall - 12,000
Barnstaple - 31,000
Okehampton - 10,000
Looe - 5,500
Swanage - 10,000
Bude - 10,000
Newquay - 24,000
Portishead - 26,000
Exmouth - 36,000
Penzance - 21,000

A surprise is the number achieved by Okehampton. (Also, always tickled that St Ives eclipses Penzance, though that's for... reasons.)

Mark

They are smashing stats,I was looking at just one station,Barnstaple.

It states 600,000 arrivals.

There are 17 arrivals at Barnstaple which means that if every train was full and standing on arrival
 the MAXIMUM amount of passengers arriving at Barnstaple with
17 trains each day 365 days equates to 1,241,000 million passengers per year
So to sum up does every train at arriving at Barnstaple have approx 100 passengers on it?

All the statistics are journeys rather than arrivals.   600,000 journeys = 300,000 arrivals + 300,000 departures

Thank you for posting, those are indeed amazing figures.

Were it possible, it would be interesting to know:
a) The type of travel e.g. work commute, school commute, business, tourist, leisure
b) Whether a long or short distance journey

With Okehampton, I think that indeed that the Interchange is likely to take a lot of the park & ride and bus-sourced traffic. For a lot of people in places like Bude, the preference is to drive into Exeter if they are going on a longer journey such as London. I suspect that direct 80x trains from Okehampton through to London in the morning and evening would bring a lot of new users. 

It will also be interesting to see what the figures for Portishead and Pill end up being. The business case reckoned 958,980 passenger trips per year for the two in the opening year based on an hourly service (https://metrowestphase1.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/8.4-outline-business-case-2017-part-2-of-3.pdf)

The thing that struck me is how different all the lines / cases are. 

Falmouth Dock, Severn Beach, Paignton and Gunnislake are all at the end of branches with more major intermediate stations, and the health of the line does not hinge only on the terminal.

Weymouth ... feels to me like a case of a station that falls - badly - between two stools.  It has felt at times like a darned nuisance with peaky GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) loadings and with trains on "high days" being shortened and fewer extras.    On SWR, passengers coming in have to pass through other attractive places such as Bournemouth and Poole, and day trips are perhaps abstracted by those places.   And the station is not welcoming.   

St Ives ... the other extreme?   The station itself is basic but the marketing had people parking up at St Erth (was Lelant Saltings) and it's very much a part of the tourist flow.

It would be very interesting to make other comparisons, St Ives v Weymouth
* Number of day visitors on a typical summer day, split down by how they arrive in the town
* Number of overnight rooms for holiday makers
* Number of commuters (classic definition - regular travellers) again by mode
* Marketing budget for public transport
* Some measure of bus services in and out of the town