Great Western Coffee Shop

An update from TransWilts was requested by the Melksham Area Board of Wiltshire Council for submission yesterday (odd as it was a bank holiday, but I guess not a council holiday).   Copy at http://atrebatia.info/mab_20170829.pdf .

Feel free to ask on any individual points.

Note that request was for report for the area board's October meeting (!) so that some elements are written in a style to ensure they're still going to look sensible in 7 weeks.   However, I suspect that the request was supposed to be for the September 6th meeting of the board, and the report will hold up well if presented that day.

Oh yes, councils get bank holidays! Some council workers even get bonus days...like today as well

£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.