Great Western Coffee Shop

How has the typical railway passenger changed over the years? And how does that change the facilities needed and desired on the trains that are in use today, compared to the trains that were in use 20 years ago?  Where has all the growth in passenger numbers come from - is it evenly across journey types, or have some types of journeys grown even more dramatically than the overall growth of passenger journey numbers?  Have some journey types actually shrunk, but that fact is dwarfed by other increases?

I drew up a table thinking of my own journeys which fall into two distinct groups; no doubt this sort of thing is researched (and perhaps members can point me to a source of data); undertanding these metrics is surely something which helps plan for the future / long term?

How many journeys a year do you make by train?	50	80
What is the average distance travelled on each train journey?	120	40
How much luggage do you have with you on an average journey?	20kgs	5kgs
What is your typical party size?	1	varies
How important is the journey being available exactly when you want it?	within 2 hours is fine	within 2 hours is OK - would prefer hourly
How important is the duration of the journey?	not very	not very
How often do you take a bicycle and / or a dog or two with you?	rarely	dog(s) sometimes

I'm going to speculate that very long distance journeys now represent a much lower proportion of passenger traffic, and that medium length journeys have massively increased with extended commutes ...

I think your assumptions may be correct.  Things that have changed:

1, longer distance commuting.  Driven by house price increases in cities, more jobs in cities (ie the towns of the welsh valleys are no longer employment centres but places where people who work in Cardiff can afford to buy a house with a garden) and also I think by speeding up of long distance journeys.

2, the rise of cheap airfares.  Really long journeys from, say, Bristol to Dundee are often taken by air which would have been very expensive a generation ago.

3, Changing demographics.  Commuting aside, it sometimes appears to me that the age profile of longer distance passengers has two peaks, the elderly/retired and the young.  The middle age group are perhaps more likely to be on the road (maybe because they have 2 kids and a load of junk that they choose to cart around for those kids) whereas the older people are to be found on trains due to increased leisure time (although many of them are not exactly relaxing and it seems that many older people spend their lives post retirement chasing up and down the country after their children and grandchildren).  Fewer young people seem to be driving these days due to extortionate costs of doing so at a young age, less disposable income (tuition fees) and the appeal of being able to use an electronic device on a journey.  There have always been students to be found on trains, but I think I am seeing more 20 and 30 somethings too these days.  There must be proper data on this. 

4, changing work patterns.  Rise of the part time commuter. 

Journeys that have shrunk?  I would say that there are fewer young teenagers on the trains these days.