Yesterday I visited Newquay and Falmouth and ended the day in Penryn, Cornwall. These are places nothing line Melksham, and yet everything like when it comes to needing and having a local economy, and people needing to get around from place to place to support the local economy. I was looking and learning about what they have, what is working, and what was less than ideal for me.

I arrived in Newquay on the train at 1 p.m. with around two dozen other people, after a journey of about an hour from Par which is a small village across the Cornish peninsular and to the east.  Most of the people on the train had arrived from beyond Cornwall - longer distance - and I have some pictures of senior folks struggling up and down the steps of the footbridge with heavy cases.  In the other direction, the train up from the end of Cornwall - Penzance - was pulling in as we left; it runs every 30 minutes, so anyone wanting to connect probably started half an hour earlier but never the less it struck me as an "oops" of a connection.

Newquay was busy - the two dozen off the train realistically not making a dent in the crowds and it was very car-centric.  For sure there is a pedestrianised area and places to walk - but what a lot of car parks and cars.  Are they all needed?

Headed across the peninsular later in the day, I had a choice of a 15:10 or a 17:10 train to Par (Zig) then Zag on the train down to Truro.  It's 12 miles, 23 minutes by car according to Google.  So I decided to the bus and caught the 14:50 from the stop just up the road from the railway station. "Truro Bus Station" it proudly proclaimed.   Now Cornwall has some lovely lanes, communities that need serving, and schools with pupils who need to get home.  And this bus served them all. We went through the school yard and got a dozen or two pupils on, waiting for them all to come out. We went down lanes, turned around in a gateway at the far end of one, went around villages to serve the stop in the middle before coming back out, and we stopped a while at the Cornish Wildlife Trust in case any badgers were just waking up and wanted to get up and catch the bus. And I got off the bus at 16:35 in Truro, guessing which was the stop for the station, which like a number of GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) stations is up the hill out of the town. Really, 105 minutes on a bus for a 12 mile journey, compared to a 25 minute journey by private car - is it any wonder that people who can chose the car option? 

I *am* aware that there are multiple bus routes from Newquay to Truro, and a diagram at the bus stop for those with excellent sight showed where each served, and for the bright people the routes, numbers, and listed times all could be correlated - but nothing to say whether a bus went along the main road to Truro calling quickly at lots of roadside communities, or if it's going down the lane to Holywell and back, and via Cubert, St Newlyn East and Zenah.  Oh - and it would perhaps have been nice to have "School Days" and "School Holidays" defined on the timetable ... I might well have caught the train had I realised the 15 minutes extra that the bus had in its schedule - fulfilling a necessary role for sure, but making it less suitable as it compromised other roles.

Some little informational improvements could be made ... a note on the bus stop of the time that buses arrive at their destination (would I have done better on the Redruth bus, and train from there?  How about St Austell?). QR^▸ (QR Code - Quick Response code (2D bar code)) code to let me explore the services more that printed sheets can do, and a real time display that was functioning.  The words "Local service" on the bus - "Local service to Truro" rather than just "Truro" perhaps? None of these things rocket science.

After my journey - "Plymouth City Bus" and "Go-ahead" made me chuckle - just about as far from a city as it could be - down the lane, "go ahead and then go back the same way" - I looked it up online. Timetable attached and, sure, it was the slowest service of the day ... but why or why does the timetable just include the local stop name and not the township?  The No. 88 runs from "Bus station" via "Post office" to "Bus station" with no immediately obvious note of which bus stations!

I have gone off on something of a tangent on my report. I was previously doubtful about the "Mid Cornwall Metro" plan to double the train service to Newquay and double back at Par to St Austell, Truro and Falmouth. Looking and travelling around yesterday, I am now very much less doubtful.  Through passengers from Newquay to Falmouth Docks will be few and far between, but so much can and should be done to help people get around.  I am minded of what happened when the Cardiff to Portsmouth service stepped up to hourly many years ago - a handful of trains each day is now an hourly service with overcrowding problems and local trains added.  And I note that Melksham, where we have stepped up from a useless service to a two-hourly one, is in many ways oh-so-ripe for a Wiltshire and Bath Metro.

Very much an option under consideration.  The current platform is not long enough, by there is railway land beside the track to the north to extent quite a way, and the line used to be double track all the way.  It could be done for at least three carriages - the length of the current platform.

One thing I am aware of is that the Falmouth operation (and the Rostock to Wismar one too) are broadly enclosed operations on a single line - I say "broadly" because Falmouth does share in and out of Truro.  In contrast, GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) seem to have problems timekeeping on Swindon to Westbury and there must be an element of caution in how the loop is going to be operated to avoid passengers arriving being sat outside for a while as the second (delayed) train is awaited.   So it needs to operate in a Bad Doberan way and not in a Penryn way so that passenger are at least waiting at a platform (to depart) if the train going 'tother way is held up.

And the longest journey on the longest route




There is certainly something to be said for giving a pretty hefty clue to people waiting at the bus stop when this snail  comes along.  "Villages service to Truro"