Great Western Coffee Shop

Having a nose around the DfT (or should that be DAFT) Station Comparator site St Germans Cornwall had 29540 passengers in a year, who are served by 13 down trains a day (many of which are two coach trains), yet Lelant Saltings had a foot fall of 653 IN A YEAR but is served by 22 down trains a day many of which in summer are 4 carriage long.
Strange that 100's of people park Cars at Lelant Saltings every day in the Summer and crowd the platform, if not catching the train, there must be a heck of a lot of Bird Watchers!!!!! ;D

Also worth a look are the figures for Tyndrum Lower (17) against Upper Tyndrum (7542) to me the whole thing is a F***e ???

No, smokey, life's not fair ...  ;)

Now, at the risk of really sparking things off: how about this - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7644630.stm

(Chris ducks for shelter! ;D )

It will not surprise you to learn that I will be watching BBC Four tommorrow evening....

If you read the notes that accompany the report (which it strongly urges you to) it identifies posssible errors in the statistics where tickets have to be attributed. The Lelant Saltings one is probably down to the P&R ticket sold being valid on the whole of the St Ives branch, and therefore sales aren't attributed to any particular station. (Can anyone confirm this?) Similar on the Looe line, a high proportion of tickets are a line ranger and thus not attributable to footfall at Looe.

The Rail Regulator is aware of the shortfalls in the data and is looking to see whether they can be overcome in future years. I'm sure anyone using the stats to plan future services will also understand the shortcomings.     

I admire your optimism. Any ministry that can send their minister to a parliamentary select committee so badly briefed that it became a farce is not called D(a)fT for nothing.

Big problem with the Beaching report was it was still being used as the viability model by the DfT and BRB well in to the late 70's many more lines and stations closed because of it, however this is typical of Government and civil servants set something off leave it running and then wonder way 20 years later they have to justify spending lots of tax payers ^ to mend it

Ian did not mention how the report was done outside the Summer Holidays, thus dooming holiday branches!

He also missed out that Beeching resigned because of Beeching II, where only the Intercity lines would have remained - nothing at Worcester for example, nothing beyond Plymouth, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Swansea.

But it was an excellent and well balanced programme. Good to see lots of the Severn Valley line also!

Yep - ranger tickets, no singles issued.
The platform there is pretty long and is absolutely packed in the summer months.

It's many years since I worked in Lelant but I thought (1) the parking attendant issued combined tickets (2) the ranger ticket included a parking charge whether or not you used the park 'n ride.

The figure of 653 must be local people travelling beyond St Erth ????

 

In many cases Beeching made perfect economic sense. Remember Beeching was not a railway man!

I agree with some of his cuts. But many did not make economic sense.

Cut the branches and the tree will die - apply this to the railway and it is economics! Look at Wales - how did Beeching think that the remaining network would be profitable when it was all broken up and in isolated branches?! If he had had the sense to keep Carmathan to Aber and Bangor to Portmadog, it would be a lot stronger.

He did not look at this. Plus Earnest Marples was pro road.

I think that the whole thing was a fix. Had the job been done properly, only about 1500 miles should have been cut. And NO singling/ signal simplification which causes problems in many places (with an expensive correction price tag!).

Holiday resorts should not have been cut. Why were they cut, because it was deliberately surveyed out of holiday seasons.