Great Western Coffee Shop

I had business today in Trowbridge and tomorrow in Tewkesbury.  Add in a stop for the night at my sister's in Stroud and it's my first trip through Melksham by rail for about 25 years!  At Trowbridge there were people with clipboards counting passenger numbers. When the 19.38 to Cheltenham via Swindon arrived one got on and asked all passengers to fill in a questionnaire.  Does this bode well for service improvements, I wonder?

There was a load of people at PAD counting pax thru various entrances and counting off.

Perhaps it does; things are not as quiet behind the scenes as they might seem, I don't think. You don't know who was doing the count / survey do you?  I was speaking with someone who would know [for at least one likely organisation] a few hours back and he didn't mention it, so I'm at a bit of a loss.

Boding well?   If used properly, yes - it could bode well.  Everyone concerned needs to be fully informed about what's appropriate (documents such as the GWRUS, Wiltshire Council work, work by the incumbent and proposed open access TOCs, Jacobs, Parkman, our elected MPs -  what our MPs both Chippenham and Trowbridge - have had to say in the last six months, etc) and what needs the current service achieves, then work to bridge that gap. 

I'm no longer going to say "if a gap is identified" as it already has been - there should be a true peak, and a service each way each hour. Some of the earlier work mentioned above says "every 2 hours" but that's a long time ago - and since then there has been huge growth, and a policy to more growth in "Salisbury, Trowbridge and Chippenham" ... with more new houses under construction in Melksham too as I write, in excess of the numbers in at least one of those official growth towns.  And since then, we've had rocketing fuel prices, concern over greenhouse gases and resources running out, etc.

The lack of a decent, fast(ish) connection at the times that people want it from Melksham has a serious impact on people who need to travel to / from the place, and I can find you a monotonous stream of people who would have used a service even in just "so far in November" had it been there. And that's just me personally meeting these people.   And there's a strong flow from Trowbridge, which is really "down in the dumps" by many accounts, up to Chippenham and Swindon and beyond, and so on.

Boding well?   If used improperly, no. I can recall a survey on the line, taken a couple of years back by an organisation that prided itself on being statistically thorough and independent, that asked the current users whether the services ran at the right times for them ... and concluded that the services were about correct, based on the number of passengers counted and the fact that there was no overwhelming view for them to be moved to earlier or later times.   The fallacy is that the survey did not consider the huge number of people who simply don't use the train because it's no longer provided at the time they need to travel, or even close. It didn't learn (for example) about the likes JW who was with me last week - but declined to use the train from Melksham home to East Anglia because he wouldn't have got there until after midnight.  And it didn't learn about journeys like mine on Wednesday, where using the train all the way from / to Melksham would have meant sleeping overnight on the journey - overnight on the platform at Swindon!

I think their badges said Mouchel

Ah ... local Trownbridge company ... http://www.mouchel.com/about_us/default.aspx

People counting at PAD were being paid by the DfT. They wouldnt tell me anymore.

I heard a news article about cut to rail subsidies by Dorset council .  Now I know that Melksham is in Wilts, but could it, sadly, be for the same reasons??  Let's be optimistic and hope not!!

I think we *can* be optimistic that it's not a question of Wiltshire cutting rail subsidies ... because they don't subsidise rail.  There's nothing to cut.

If you look at improvements on the Barnstaple line from Exeter, the Severn Beach line from Temple Meads, the Bicester line from Oxford, for example, and you'll find them subsidised by the local government in their immediate areas.  But there's been a longstanding policy along the lines of "we can't subsidise rail" in Wiltshire.   

This weekend, I'm answering the Local Transport Plan (LTP3) for Wiltshire which offers to consider subsidy at up 3.50 per journey for buses in most cases (up to 5.00 per journey in some cases), but only offers to lobby others for subsidy for rail service.  This is basically an unchanged policy, which goes some of the way to explaining why you have a large town like Melksham with an incredibly poor train service, and an interconnectivity by public transport across the authority area (Chippenham to Salisbury) that takes several hours unless you dogleg out of the area and back in.  The tragedy for the area is that this poor medium and longer distance public transport offering has a significant detrimental effect on the business, economy, and thus livelyhood of the area

Shades of the Beeching report, which from what I recall relied for passenger numbers chiefly on a survey taken over a week in March, and would therefore have underestimated traffic on many lines that carried seasonal traffic. That's not to say of course that many of the branchline closures weren't entirely correct, since almost no-one used them at any time of year, but I would guess there were certainly lines that enjoyed huge traffic in the summer that may have been closed on the basis of the survey taken in March.

I assume in the absence of central computerized accounting for tickets at the time, BR didn't have such a good idea of annual passenger figures for given stations/lines as the DfT has now - no doubt it would have been possible to compile such statistics from the records of tickets sold and collected, but I suspect that would have been so labour-intensive as to be prohibitive!