When Wiltshire Council asked for support through a local sustainable transport fund grant for a three year trial of an appropriate train service on the northern section of the TransWilts line (the Swindon to Westbury section of the Swindon to Salisbury line), they rightly set
targets of passenger journey numbers that they wanted to surpass, with those numbers set such that they would offer a viable way forward into the future at the end of the three year trial should they be achieved. Those targets are 45,000 passenger journeys on the section of the line which isn't shared with other services in the first year, rising to 108,000 journeys on the same section in the third year.
Separately from the targets, there are
predictions of the passenger journey numbers we might expect. Independently, Wiltshire Council, First, the community and the community's consultants have come up with ideas / predictions of the sort of numbers that we might achieve, and those are a range of predictions - lower figures based on some things not working quite as well as we might expect, and higher figures reflecting the results we would expect if everything goes well together. The predictions are all subjective, and many of them are based on commercially confidential data, so it wouldn't be right for me to share them all here.
What I can tell you is where we're headed in the first year, now that we're two thirds of the way through. It's no longer a case of predictions based largely on commercial data and theoretical work; rather it's now based on the extrapolation of actual data for the remaining part of the year, and I don't expect we'll be very far from 165,000 journeys - that's 3.6 times our target for the first year, and already 1.53 times our target for the third year.
In the past few days, I have been asked to justify how we got our forecasts so wrong, with some resulting doubt placed on our predictions. But we didn't get any forecasts wrong - the targets were / are the figures we need to reach for there to be no realistic question but that we've got enough traffic, and they are figures we need to reach to help ensure a viable basis for the continuation of the service. They were based on that model ... yes, we checked to ensure that the targets were going to be easy to achieve, and indeed we would have been foolish to set ourselves targets about which there was any real doubt. So we can celebrate being may times over target, with heads held high.
I will admit that our results are coming in very much at the upper end of predictions. And that's because of everything and everyone coming together to make it all work. Wiltshire Council with their support. First Great Western, who have made a number of decisions that have been really helpful, and their fabulous operations team, and some of our community members who have been there on the ground and getting into the hearts and making sure that people know about the services and the options, know where to ask questions, and feel an ownership.Edit note: Some minor typos corrected, purely to improve ease of reading grahame's post. CfN. 
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