£700 per day for an extra evening service???
Around 4 hours of extra staffing costs, plus 70 miles of fuel and track access. How does that equate to £700?
No staff available ... so would be adding extra shifts for driver and conductor. Google search tells me £45k average
GWR▸ driver salary, add Train Manager, add most of a second crew because (at 6 or 7 days a week) you'll realistically get just over 200 actual shifts out of a crew and need 311 or 363.
Realist solution is to look at other services that would fit into the shift and the price for this service would come down. Those other services are not necessarily directly before or after the new train in question, as patterns could be moved around; the price quoted was simply what it would be to run as a stand-alone operation. The 50k to 200k difference tells us that 150k is crew.
More and more, hourly Romsey - Southampton Loop - Salisbury - Westbury - Swindon looks sensible, and with that crew shifts would naturally run into the evening, without that horrid extra step cost for a late train.
