TransWilts - now and in the coming years

[whole diary]

[regnir]

Thanks for posting that, Chris.  To my knowledge, there have been quite a number responses to the consultation from all across Wiltshire (and beyond) asking for an improvement of services Swindon -> Westbury -> Salisbury, and I'm not aware of responses that took a different view on this topic.

My view differs.

I have always been of the opinion that the TransWilts ranks some way down the list of potential passenger rail service improvements, because alternatives exist for virtually every flow that it could cater for. This in turn means that it would bring a relatively small number of genuinely new passenger journeys to the rail network, in comparison to other more worthy schemes elsewhere.

I do agree that there is a problem to address though, but it is not one of a lack of train services. Rather, it is the fact that the alternatives are often needlessly badly planned, organised and timed.

A prime example is the First Bus 234 Frome-Trowbridge-Melksham-Chippenham service, which serves Chippenham railway station during the morning peak and evening. This service is characterised by ^connections^ which see bus miss train by a matter of minutes on a number of occasions each day.

Therefore it seems clear to me that the answer lies in sorting out these alternatives so they interface properly, rather than create a new train service which is likely to be lightly-used for much of the time.

What I would like to see is First include the 234 bus service in their franchise bid, and revamp it so that it connects every hour with the Cardiff-Portsmouth rail service at Trowbridge railway station (for onward journeys to the likes of Warminster, Salisbury and Southampton), and connects with a London-bound service at Chippenham railway station every hour (for onward journeys to the likes of Swindon, Reading and London).

My suggested hourly Monday-Saturday 234 bus service pattern is as follows:

(Starts from Wells Bus Station as Service 161, departing at xx30)
FROME (Sainsbury^s) ^ xx31
FROME (Market Place) ^ arrive xx37
FROME (Market Place) ^ depart xx49
Oldfield ^ xx54
Beckington ^ xx58
Rode ^ xx04
Southwick ^ xx10
Upper Studley ^ xx12
Train from Portsmouth ^ arrive xx16
TROWBRIDGE (Railway Station) ^ xx21
TROWBRIDGE (Town Hall) ^ arrive xx24
TROWBRIDGE (Town Hall) ^ depart xx26
Hilperton Marsh ^ xx32
Hilperton ^ xx36
Semington ^ xx43
MELKSHAM (Market Place) ^ xx50
Beanacre ^ xx55
Lacock ^ xx00
CHIPPENHAM (Railway Station) ^ xx16
Train to London ^ depart xx25
CHIPPENHAM (Bus Station) ^ xx21

CHIPPENHAM (Bus Station) ^ xx44
Train from London ^ arrive xx44
CHIPPENHAM (Railway Station) ^ xx49
Lacock ^ xx04
Beanacre ^ xx08
MELKSHAM (Market Place) ^ xx16
Semington ^ xx22
Hilperton ^ xx27
Hilperton Marsh ^ xx29
TROWBRIDGE (Town Hall) - arrive xx35
TROWBRIDGE (Town Hall) ^ depart xx37
TROWBRIDGE (Railway Station) ^ xx40
Train to Portsmouth ^ depart xx53
Upper Studley ^ xx49
Southwick ^ xx52
Rode ^ xx57
Beckington ^ xx03
Oldfield ^ xx07
FROME (Market Place) ^ arrive xx13
FROME (Market Place) ^ depart xx20
FROME (Sainsbury^s) ^ xx25
(Continues to Wells Bus Station as Service 161, arriving at xx25)

NOTE ^ I have proposed that the 234 bus service interworks at Frome with the First Bus 161 service to Wells each hour. This ensures that an extra bus will not be required to run the 234 via Chippenham railway station each hour.

The bid should ensure that valid Melksham rail tickets are accepted not only on the 234 bus service, but also on the hourly First Bus 272 service from Melksham to Bath bus station, which is a mere stones throw away from not only Bath city centre but Bath Spa railway station as well, and its frequent rail service connections to the Bristol area.

This should be sufficient provision for the TransWilts on Monday-Saturday, which means that passenger rail services on the Melksham line need only be specified on Sundays (when the 234 bus service doesn^t run), where the current rail service pattern should be enough to satisfy demand. This could be augmented on Summer Sundays by additional rail services linked to the Weymouth line, as this is one of the few TransWilts flows that have proven potential to attract significant numbers of genuinely new passenger journeys to the rail network.

So there you have it ^ A cost-effective solution that saves money by removing the ridiculous specification requirement to provide a near-useless ^marginal time^ Monday-Saturday Melksham line passenger rail service, while still covering all the relevant TransWilts service provision angles. Furthermore it^s a solution that requires no additional bus or train resources, as opposed to wasting both taxpayers money and precious rolling stock on sending a unit trundling up and down the Melksham line near-empty for most of the day.

Problem solved.

[grahame]

Thanks for posting that, Chris.  To my knowledge, there have been quite a number responses to the consultation from all across Wiltshire (and beyond) asking for an improvement of services Swindon -> Westbury -> Salisbury, and I'm not aware of responses that took a different view on this topic.

My view differs.

I would love to learn further - really appreciate a complete copy.

For the moment, I'm moving away from the generalities where there is much more to be said and discussed, but where it's difficult for us to put our case other than in a general diluted form against the conclusion you've listed here without seeing the full detail on which you've based it.

Can I ask about your bus proposal?  Well noted that the 161 has a longish layover at Wells at present, and apparent slack in the timetable. Linking something end to end with the 234, so that the 234 route can be elongated slightly in Chippenham is an interesting thought. There are some questions that pop up, though, on this specific route suggestion (which was new to me, though I think others more technical may have considered it before)

a) Some journeys on the 161 are currently provided with assistance funding by Somerset Council, who have been making subsidy cuts - can the hourly service be relied upon to work through from Frome to Wells for the next 15 years, which is what we're looking at under this franchise

b) A glance at the timetable of bus route 174 shows that it leaves Wells bus station a few minutes after service 161 gets there, and gets back into Wells Bus station a few minutes before service 161 leaves. Does this by any chance use the same vehicle as is on route 161?  If so, how do you propose to provide the service on route 174 once you have retimed the 161?

c) Some of the vehicles on route 234 are double deckers, due to the sort of levels of traffic.  Does that also apply to route 161?   That would be a bit or a surprise to me, given that half the services during the day on route 161 are subsidised.

d) An assumption that the buses and trains will be run by the same company is a dangerous one - at this stage, I don't think you can assume that First will win the franchise. Or is there something deeper here such as inside knowledge that it's a done deal, or looking to shift the goalposts to make it awkward for others who don't run the bus?

e) There are also matters to be looked at - how the six weeks needed to change a bus service will fit in with people's long term plans, what will happen when the bus is held up by the ineviatable road works on the A350 or any other traffic issues all the way down to Wells, whether the retiming to suit train connections breaks other connections, etc. I'm not saying "insoluble", but you've got an awful lot of issues to solve on this one.  And you have seriously longer bus than rail journeys, especially when you add interchange time which needs to be rather more than train -> train timing for bus -> train; you seem to be suggesting a 75 minute journey Trowbridge -> Swindon, where the train takes 35, and 60 minutes Westbury to Chippenham (70 the other way) versus 25 on the train both ways.  Train dogleg via Bath is quicker that the bus, but still MUCH longer that the direct train. Thoughts on those issues?

Anyway - I certainly applaud the idea of better bus / train integration at Chippenham and Trowbridge and it's something we're been looking at in various ways for years.   We got morning / evening service to go via the station in Chippenham, and have got additional signage at that station to tell people about the 234 buses in the evening.

I know my brief inside out

Excellent - so you have answers to all of the issues above. We would love to hear them, but isn't it rather odd too that in spite of the services having been run by the same company already for a number of years, these issues remain, and we've been racking our brains over them.  Perhaps you've been in a position to stand back and see what we couldn't?   Hope so!  I look forward to you taking me up on my offer in the other thread to where we'll be unconstrained by limits placed on you by your employers, whoever they might be, and we can help you and them be more informed if they turn out to be a bidder or a decision influencer.

[Southern Stag]

d) An assumption that the buses and trains will be run by the same company is a dangerous one - at this stage, I don't think you can assume that First will win the franchise. Or is there something deeper here such as inside knowledge that it's a done deal, or looking to shift the goalposts to make it awkward for others who don't run the bus?

I don't think it would necessarily matter, it could work in the same way as the council tendering for bus routes, instead of the council specifying and funding the way the route was run it would be the new franchise holder. It wouldn't matter who ran the bus and who ran the train if the rail franchise was funding and specifying the bus service, as required by the franchise agreement.

[phile]

Used the 234 today from Trowbridge to visit the new Wetherspoons in Melksham which opened yesterday.  Cost me ^7.90 return (wife and I) as my Welsh bus pass useless in England !!!   Would have avoided that perhaps if there was a train service during the day.

[mjones]

[...This service is characterised by ^connections^ which see bus miss train by a matter of minutes on a number of occasions each day....

Unfortunately this charactises rather a lot of bus-rail interchanges. In the last edition of Rail Barry Doe discussed a problem with connections at Axminster, for a service specifically intended to provide a rail to bus connection. First had retimed departures for Lyme Regis allowing only a few minutes to get across a footbridge and to the bus stop, thereby making it likely people will miss the connection and also making the connection time too short for South West Trains to include it in their timetable of connecting services. Near where I work there is a half-hourly bus service that is now timetabled to depart from Bracknell bus station at pretty well exactly the same time as the half-hourly train from Reading arrives.  I raised it with First's customer services and got a fairly useless reply suggesting I should go to Sandhurst instead to catch that bus, where there is only an hourly train service and it is outside the PlusBus zone.

I think the underlying problem is that bus operators don't actually believe that many rail passengers will ever travel by bus. They work in a market where the vast number of their passengers make single stage trips without connection with any other mode of transport, and they can't see that ever changing, so make no effort to ensure connections work; which is of course self-fulfilling. And therein lies one of the problems with your suggestion, which is that, apart from the significantly greater journey time, people just won't have confidence that connecting services will be maintained or timetabled sensibly; and unfortunately the different regulatory regimes under which rail and bus operate make it very difficult for anyone to enforce integration.

[JayMac]

Near where I work there is a half-hourly bus service that is now timetabled to depart from Bracknell bus station at pretty well exactly the same time as the half-hourly train from Reading arrives.  I raised it with First's customer services and got a fairly useless reply suggesting I should go to Sandhurst instead to catch that bus, where there is only an hourly train service and it is outside the PlusBus zone.

I have a good friend who lives in Bracknell and I visit regularly. We often head in to London and it is indeed frustrating that some of the local First Bus services arriving into Bracknell Bus Station do so at the time a London bound train is due to depart.

I too raised the issue with First in Berkshire and was told that the only thing I could do was catch an earlier bus or a later train. 

[grahame]

I usually enjoy answering alternative cases put by a "Devil's Advocate", as they provide a strong ground against which to test a hypothysis.  In this case, however, I find my self answering a partially published case put forward by a poster who's being very selective with what (s)he tells us, anonymous under a psedonym that spells "ringer" back to front. He/she is yet to take up my offer to provide the full alterative case, behind the scenes if there is commercially confident data there, which might answer some of the anomolies in the suggestions.  If Regnir is an expert, then he/she should be able to do far better unless he/she has a hidden agenda.

Anyway - I'll continue to await an explanation as to why First haven't sorted things out using buses in seven years before, but could do so now and in such a way that buses alone would provide a complete solution with a positive outcome.  And I'll continue to scratch my head as to how proof that people will use the train on Summer Sunday mornings can be translated into a conclusion that they won't use them at other times.   Perhaps Ringer is baseing his/her conclusion primarily on old data. I note (s)he states "I have always been of the opinion that the TransWilts ranks some way down the list" and "When the 2000s came along, I realised that the real money was to be made from consultancy, and that to get a real piece of the pie, I would have to move to London".  Those comments don't say "I have considered all the evidence now available" to me - rather they indicate a support of the same conclusion that the SRA^» (Strategic Rail Authority - about) reached in 2004, on a knifeedge and using general rail growth of 1% per annum compound, in marginal favour of a service that comprised only a commuter train to Swindon rather than a two-hourly shuttle.  But that conculsion is outdated.

For every 100 rail passengers in West Wiltshire in 2003, there were 160 in 2010 - 7% compound growth.  I have chosen 2003 as that's the year in which the SRA figures were measured; by being selective and taking a more recent selective period, I could come up with an even higher growth figure, but that could be argued to be poor statistical practise.  So - what do those figures mean?

Compound growth of 100 passengers in 2012 over a 15 year franchise at 1% leads to 117 passengers in 2028
Compound growth of 100 passengers in 2012 over a 15 year franchise at 7% leads to 276 passengers in 2028

It's even more startling if we extrapollate from 2003 to 2028:
At 1%, 100 passengers in 2003 would have reached 124 by 2028 (option (a))
At 7%, 100 passengers in 2003 would have reached 443 by 2028 (option (b))

Option (a) has been proven by time to be incorrect - but it's the basis of the current service.  We've already seen an increase in the first 7 years of the 22 year period that's 3 times greater than was predicted for the whole 22 years, and need to specify for the next franchise something fit for the future, not anchored on out of date intelligence that turned out to be wrong.   That's a statement for the whole of the West Wilts area; being specific for the TransWilts, you need to look at additional comparative data (and we have) away from current rail traveller numbers as you can't sensibly extrapollate from the current service level; to do so would be just as peverse as an assumption that sucess with an improved Sunday service appears to have lead Regnir to support the conclusion that it would fail with an improved Monday to Saturday service.

[ellendune]

A Swindon Salisbury Journey would be competitve if done directly by rail.  The alternative of a connecting bus between Chippenham and Trowbridge is out of the question as the bus takes an hour between the two.  Connecting trains at bath is better but the additional travel time and standing around for the connection all adds to the jopurney time.  A bus from Swindon to Salisbury is also tortuously slow. 

In short without a direct rail service there is no question.  I will drive to Salisbury.  A pity since there is a perfectly good railway line between the two which could do the journey in a comparable time without having to find somewahere to park in Salisbury.

[Lee]

ellendune - Can I just ask (and forgive me if you have already posted the info elsewhere) but how often do you drive along the TransWilts corridor in the absence of a train?

I ask because I'm doing some research into how many people are currently driving who could be attracted by a better TransWilts rail service.

If other members also have anything to add on this, then please feel free.

[ellendune]

At the moment in frequently but I know someone who does Swindon Salisbury once a week. 

[bobm]

ellendune - Can I just ask (and forgive me if you have already posted the info elsewhere) but how often do you drive along the TransWilts corridor in the absence of a train?

I ask because I'm doing some research into how many people are currently driving who could be attracted by a better TransWilts rail service.

If other members also have anything to add on this, then please feel free.

I have turned down business in Salisbury because of the problems of getting there from Swindon. Owing to problems with my eyesight I cannot drive at the moment and the bus is just too much of a time waster in its present form.

[bobm]

Near where I work there is a half-hourly bus service that is now timetabled to depart from Bracknell bus station at pretty well exactly the same time as the half-hourly train from Reading arrives.  I raised it with First's customer services and got a fairly useless reply suggesting I should go to Sandhurst instead to catch that bus, where there is only an hourly train service and it is outside the PlusBus zone.

I have a good friend who lives in Bracknell and I visit regularly. We often head in to London and it is indeed frustrating that some of the local First Bus services arriving into Bracknell Bus Station do so at the time a London bound train is due to depart.

I too raised the issue with First in Berkshire and was told that the only thing I could do was catch an earlier bus or a later train. 

I have exactly the same problem coming from Swindon to Bracknell. That same bus you get to the station then leaves almost straight away so if you are coming off the London bound train it's just coming up the slope out of the bus station as you walk/run out of the railway station (except Sundays) when the trains arrive halfway between te half hourly bus departures.

[Chris from Nailsea]

... I'm doing some research into how many people are currently driving who could be attracted by a better TransWilts rail service.

If other members also have anything to add on this, then please feel free.

I often drive from Nailsea to Melksham, because the currently available TransWilts train journey options (whether via Bath Spa or Chippenham) just don't meet my daytime meeting timetable requirements.

[Lee]

Next question - What level of service would be required in order to attract people who are currently driving?

Again, if other members also have anything to add on this, then please feel free.

[John R]

There are a few people at my employer who live in the Salisbury area and work in Swindon. And as I know only a small proportion of a couple of thousand employees on the site, one can extrapolate that there are probably many more. They complain that the journey is slow and tedious, but there's no alternative. I would have thought even one service each way that gave them around 8 to 9 hours in Swindon rather than the current 11 would prove very attractive.