Great Western Coffee Shop

Thursday 12th March 2009:  Brief AGM followed by presentation  'What's going on at South West Trains', speaker Phil Dominey Stakeholder Manager SWT to be held at The Swan Hotel, Church Street, Bradford on Avon. AGM 7.00pm, presentation 7.30pm.

Wednesday 22nd April 2009 at Bridge House, Trowbridge 7.30pm 'Wiltshire Unitary Council Candidates on Public Transport ' spokesperson from each party and independents to present and be quizzed about their aspirations for public transport, particularly trains.

An interesting presentation by Phil (in a room that was so hot that I felt quite ill ... but that's off topic).   I am going to say "all the usual SWT stuff" - not to decry it in any way, but to just get on to some of the headlines which effect areas also served by FGW ...

a) There were 2 Salisbury - Bristol services in the SWT franchise bid, optional, but they were taken, and there are actually 4 services running each way now, with 3 being through to / from London.   The short workings from Salisbury provide a rush hour train into Bristol and a late night train out of Bristol, and are critical parts of the timetable.   Catering was not being used on the Salisbury - Bristol section and has been withdrawn, but on the other hand SWT would like to add another service.

b) 58% of tickets are now bought at machines, rising to 70% at Watertloo. The ongoiong discussions with regard to when ticket offices must be manned are reaching detailed conclusion, with a general ruling that a ticket office must remain open if it has been selling more that 12 tickets in any particular hour.

c) 44 Extra car parking spaces at Grateley are helping the commuter flow there / removing parking from neighbouring streets.   Andover is 'jammed' but SWT are exploring an old tunnel (seeing if it still exists) that was closed in 1927 to see if they can run cars under the station to park to the North.   Further parking mentioned West of Salisbury.

d) Parking at Weymouth.   The old "pay 7 pounds and get 5 back when you use the train" has gone, to be replaced by a flat three pounds.   Phil did not know the background. Concern was expressed that it's much cheaper for nontravellers than council parking now, and will be taken over by people in town by car for the day.

e) Discussion on connections Swt -> Fgw and vice versa at Salsibury, where it seems that neither company holds trains and one can be pulling in as the other pulls out.   Very awkard in the morning commute to wards London and frustrating as the train off Salisbury sits at Grately to await time.   Also very frustrating when the last FGW leaves towards Bristol and misses the Swt.

f) Dean and Dunbridge remain with Fgw even though they have no trains calling there.  Swt offered to take over if Fgw (who have payment for them in their contract) bring them up to the higher Swt standard, but that hasn't happened.

g) 6600 dwellings (circa 15,000 population?) at Cranbrook near Exeter and it will justify a station on the Waterloo - Exter line I hope it gets a service as well as a station ... coming from Melksham with a population of 21,000 and a station, but scarecly a service, I wonder!

h) "On time" - i.e. within five minutes has risen from 70% to 93% in the last five years. Truely on time (i.e. not even a few seconds late) is at 70% and SWT use this measure internally.

Personal Comment - Swt are naturally going to be reluctant to antagonise Fgw by looking to run services up to Swindon and / or serve places like Oldfield Park and Keynsham more, but there is scope for some rationalisation on Salisbury - Southampton (esp. the Fgw extras) to allow the northern end of the Southampton - Swindon corridor to get a better service.  And it 'makes sense' in that the total number of passenger carried - so the total income overall - would INCREASE. 

Just to add that Phil said they were looking at plugging the gap in the afternoon, although a couple of WWRUG members would have liked to have seen an earlier direct train. This was part of the 'holding' argument as early travellers via Salisbury tended to miss the connection as Pompey service regularly ran a couple of minutes late.

It was pointed out that this would probably be opposed by FGW as it would probably been seen as revenue abstraction.

It would be great if SWT could add an extra service out of Waterloo to Bristol around 4-5pm to plug the huge gap in service between 12.20-19.20. The spread of services TO Waterloo from Bristol is pretty good at 08.50, 13.10 and 15.52.

I've had some email correspondence with SWT recently about car parking charges, basically because the signage at Fareham and Eastleigh, and the station TVMs were out of step, the latter still had two rates displayed, and initially at Fareham the TVM didn't reflect the ^2.00 evening rate after 1600 either.

Up until late last year the 'coin op' parking machines had this '^2.00 rebate at ticket office' with two part ticketing, but this stopped in January, unannounced except for it not appearing on the car park notices anymore.

Reading between the lines this obviously coincided with the phone in payment system known as 'Ringo' being introduced - obviously a phone in system can't differentiate rail and other users, and I don't believe the TVMs were programmed to only allow the discounted rate with a rail ticket purchase anyway, so they probably took the easy option and went for a single daily rate.

It was only last week that the Fareham TVMs stopped displaying two rates for daytime parking though, nearly 3 months after the coin machines were changed - presumably anyone daft enough to pay the higher rate won't even have realised...

Paul

Further details sent to me by the West Wilts Rail Users Group (my poor formatting!)


Bridge House is just a few yards from Trowbridge station.   I'm planning to the there - it should be an excellent opportunity to compare what th epolitical parties are offering.   elections for the new Wiltshire Council take place on 4th June.

WWRUG web site updated ...  http://www.wwrug.org.uk

... properly formatted advert for 22nd April event at http://www.wwrug.org.uk/calendar.html

Graham

I was unfortunately away last week for the meeting, and was curious as to how it went. You have indicated in another thread your concerns with one of the candidates over their support for the trans Wilts issue, will there be an overview of proceedings?

My particular interest was in the issue of transport hubs, a subject that was specifically listed in the flyer, in particular the redevelopment of the old Bowyers site in Trowbridge and the opportunity it could present for a transport hub at the station instead of the ludicrous situation of using the town centre as a bus station.

I was wondering if this had been raised on the day?

Let me at give you some links ... I have commented on the meeting briefly at:
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=4593.0
and I wrote a further report, looking specifically at the TransWilts case, at:
http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=7975.0

The meeting was organised by the West Wilts Rail User's Group ... and if there's going to be an official set of minutes / report of proceeedings, rather than purely individual's views, then it would come from (I suspect) theire secretary, Bob Lee - the WWRUG web site with contact details is at http://www.wwrug.org.uk/index.html

Although I am personally a member of WWRUG, and I fully support their aims (as they do the aims of Save the Train, etc), I'm not on their committee nor do I hold any office. That's my choice - I was asked at one point, and declined as I feel it would by hypocritical of me to represent rail USERS at a time that I'm not able to be a regular user of trains myself, due to lack of services.  It's much more appropriate for me to act via other local groups such as the railway development group.

In answer to your specific question with regard to interchanges and integration - no, there was little if anything said on the subject.  I do recall hearing of bus subsidies of up to 12 pounds per "bum on a seat", of the fact that the county has to find money for such things (over, it appears, a tenth of that per bum on a seat over a much longer distance on the TransWilts!) and a lot aboout Westbury bypass, and subsequent improvements to be made such as at Yarnbrook and doubling the Chippenham bypass, which struck my as somewhat off the "sustainable" topic.

The meeting could usefully have run for a further 10 to 20 questions / another hour, but it stopped quite early and before some of us even had the opportunity to ask a single question due to the limited time that one of the key speakers had.