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February 16, 2008

Milk producers

Why do we drink cow's milk, but not pig's milk?

Cows can produce around 65 pints of milk a day, whereas pigs produce around 17 pints. And pigs milk has to be collected from goodness knows how many teats, whereas cows have just 4 bigguns. Then you have the issue that pigs can't become pregnant while lactating whereas cows can, and that pig milk comes out a lot slower than cow's milk ....

What has this got to do with trains?

The Intercity 125 service from London Paddington to Bristol is a "cash cow" for First Great Western, and services run by 142 / 143 / 150 / 153 / 158 trains are pigs to finance. Not only does a "125" have many more seats, but the train runs faster too. So it takes more money per seat in a certain time, with fewer crew. It keeps taking the money for longer too since journey times tend to be longer, and because of a peverse fare system customers are charged much more per unit of product for the service that's cheaper to provide. Don't shoot the messenger, folks - sorry, that's the gist of the FGW operation and helps to explain why the 125s I was on last week were comfortable, but the "West" trains were overcrowded to the point of discomfort.

But there's rather more to it than that. For sure the "West" service will never produce a revenue stream that makes a significant contribution to the Chancellor directly - but it can sure as heck help the financial and economic case for the area and - at least in the case of the TransWilts history - there's a very high proportion of traffic on the local train that goes on to the main line service.

The majority of our customers now drive to Melksham. From Yeovil, from Warrington, from London, from Cambridge, from South Wales just recently. Customers who - in the past - would have travelled here all the way by train. But the options of "get a taxi from Chippenham", "get a bus from Bath" or "Sleep on the platform at Swindon and get the 06:18" attract only a minority. And the result is that the cutting of that 10 minute link, just a few times a day, has resulted in a huge loss of profitable business!

A return ticket between Melksham and London now costs over 100 pounds. Most customer on the route would travel (our business anyway) on main line 125 trains that have spare capacity anyway (timing details available) so a realistic accountant could put the whole of that 100 pounds down as TransWilts income. Let's see. If that was just 2 round journeys a day, just 5 days a week and 50 weeks a year, we're looking at an income for First of £50,000. And don't I recall that there used to be not 2 but 20 on each train.

Me thinks the cows will yield far more milk if they're given the pigs back to keep them company. And they'll all be much happier too.

Posted by gje at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

February 12, 2008

An unusual journey for me - some observations

A Single ticket window open, and a long queue; a mature couple making what seemed to be a refund enquiry for a lost ticket. Sign saying "Why queue twice" extolling value of tickets to include London Travel cards, and I wondered "why do have to queue at all - why not open more than one window at this busy time of day?" No, I didn't feel confident in getting the ticket I needed out of the machines! We moved eventually, and the lady in front of me asked for a Southampton ticket; I wondered why she had been particularly anxious, and now realised she was catching the 06:34 from Chippenham ... and the following train on that route isn't until 19:00 - it's a real "Third World" service!

An unusual journey for me this morning - I'm working in a suburb of Cardiff and taking the train. The first train out of Melksham wouldn't get me to my destination station until 6 minutes after I'm due to start talking to a class of 12 (yes, that's right - the first train was too LATE for me this morning!) so my via Chippenham adventure.

£23.50 fare - Saver Return, Melksham (for return there at end of day) to Cathays. I could have save myself about a pound by buying a ticket to Bristol and a Bristol to Cathays ticket, I know ...

The morning gave me a rare chance to look at the 05:29 from Gloucester to Southampton (via Swindon and Melksham) as it came through Chippenham and see how well it's loaded. It came through at about 06:39 - 5 minutes late. Single carriage. 2 passengers on as it pulled into Chippenham and both got off; five joined including a group of 3 clearly on a long distance journey rather than a daily commute (cases, baby), and (I think) the lady I mentioned earlier.

Joined 06:40 to Swansea - 5 late, 20 - 30 passengers per carriage ex Chippenham, of who most joined actually at Chippenham. I noted a one hour gap in following Westbound trains. Train cleaner through collecting rubbish between Chippenham and Bath. Lots of people on the platform at Bath (to join?) and yet we didn't seem to get too much busier.

I think the 06:40 is the only train from Chippenham direct to South Wales, and I was interested to see how many through passengers there were - how many people remained on the train at Bristol Temple Meads. "Some" is a fair answer; not a lot, but enough got on to make the ongoing load reasonably respectable. But it did strike me just how empty and cavernous Temple Meads appeared, and how crowded busy (steamed up!) the 143 that came in from the North headed for Taunton seemed to be. And at around 07:20 we were away and onwards.

"Coaches E through H for Filton Abbey Wood" - ah - we're using SDO, and as there won't have been Grandfather rights there, this must be a new service dating from just last December. It took time - 07:26:45 to 07:29:48 - 183 second stop - and we then gently pulled forward to stop again with the rear of the train in the platform. Final departure - 07:31:30 - 285 seconds. One heck of a slowdown compared to past times, where (on the London suburban runs where I was brought up), just 20 seconds was allowed for a station stop, and 3 minutes was enough time to stop at Pettw Wood and do all the station duties ... AND to do the mile and a half to Chiselhurt and complete station duties there too! I think the double stop was to get a cycle out of the rear 'van' - not sure how often that's done

No-one on the platform at Pilning as we dashed through in the semi-light ...

Severe Check on the approach to Severn Tunnel Junction, which we passed though slowly; cars in the car park indicated that at least some commuters had already left there, but we were clearly "between stopping trains" at 07:45 as the place look desolate.

And we ran into Newport at 07:55. More on than off ... perhaps a third of the seats occupied as we travelled on to Cardiff, and I found my self wondering how busy Bristol commuter trains were getting - it's not as busy in Wales, perhaps ;-). And just a minute to do the station work - what a contrast to Abbey Wood.

Posted by gje at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2008

Want to comment? You're welcome on the forum

I welcome comments on this blog. There's no way that I want to stop any readers coming back with comments on what I have said - such disussions make a very lively ongoing debate on certain subjects, and other viewpoints add so much to what is sometimes somewhat onesided in what I write.

But, this morning, I have turned your ability to comment here off. That's because there's been a significant growth in "Comment Spam" - people or automata who are posting up messages off topic to advertise their services and bearing no relationship at all to what this site is about. To give you an idea of the scale of this, I'm seeing about 2 dozen comments an hour and that's 24 x 7 and here on the "Save the Train" blog, I see that over 11000 comments have now been submitted to a blog that has some 250 entries of mine in total

Here's a graph of our incoming email traffic

The red section is emails which are rejected by our spam filters, and the blue are emails that are delivered to our email boxes. Each bar is 24 hours, with weekly lines. Horizontal lines every 250 emails.

But - PLEASE - comment via the forums that I use / administer. I am posting this to both my Horse's Mouth blog - Open Source programming, Hotel, Wiltshire, Personal stuff and to my Save the Train blog where I'm making dealing with train services (or lack thereof) from Swindon via Chippenham and Melksham to Trowbridge and Salisbury.

Forums:

Opentalk - Open Source

Save the Train - TransWilts Train Service

First Great Western Coffee Shop - Rest of First Great Western area

I look forward to your - human, real - comments on those places!

Posted by gje at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2008

Where has our train gone?

I was in Nottingham last week ... and I was impressed by the quality and range of services on offer by rail. I commuted from there to Beeston (up to six services per hour) and took a few pictures to share.

Please excuse the poor quality - I was travelling in the rush hour and at this time of year that mean's it's dark or halflight at best.

The internal picture was the busiest train that I was on; the long train you see pictures (at Beeston) was - I think - two five car units and I was struck by the fact that there didn't seem to be a single passenger in the rear unit, and only a very few in the front.

Perhaps I got a skewed picture - there was nothing scientific about my observations that would withstand any statistical analysis - but it does look rather like there are some trains that are much longer than necessary floating around and a little bit of stock juggling (if everyone was willing) might actually allow a service to be provided where there's not at all, or people are denied boarding, at present.

Posted by gje at 06:01 AM | Comments (0)