Richard Rowland, Regional Manager for First Great Western in the East, added: “We have been very pleased to work with the county council over the past year to give the station a new look, and to support this work the fares to Oxford will be reduced from the May 12 with prices starting from £2 to encourage further use of this route.

Here are some quotes from the original Beeching Report :

"Common-sense considerations, and all experience, go to show that the problem cannot be solved either by decreasing or increasing fares."

"If fares were halved, traffic would have to increase at least fourfold to cover the direct costs of stopping services as a group, and sixfold to make them pay their whole costs (although more effiicient collection of fares and a more accurate usage figures reporting system would obviously be helpful in 2006 - Lee.) Nobody can seriously suppose that this would happen. People without their own transport (or with their own cars in 2006 - Lee) , at present, are not so seriously deterred by the rail fares for short journeys that they would use trains many times as often if fares were halved."

"Similarly, consideration of the cost figures will show that thinning out the trains, or thinning out the stations, would not make a service self-supporting even if it had no adverse effect on revenue."

I believe that Beeching was right to the extent that cheaper fares are not the answer on their own. The real key lies in providing an attractive , reliable , well marketed & positively developed rail service with an appropriate frequency , which is then linked into a truly integrated public transport system  , and not in short - term measures which may well be designed by First to bring in any money that they can until the services are cut further.

‘One of our key aims is to attract people to rail travel’.

Cost is not the only way to attract passengers.  The starting point should be to run a regular and punctual sevice.   If there is not a train then no amount of discounting will attract the public.  As I mentioned in my introductory post on 12 August, when the rail service I use started to run trains regularly, albeit every one or two hours, stopping at every station, passenger numbers seemed to increase.  Certainly this is the case where stations  were previously only served by two or three trains a day.  If you know when the train will be there you have no reason to look for  an alternative method of transport.

In partnership with Oxfordshire County Council, First Great Western will be operating a special service on the weekend of 12/13 May to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the re-opening of the Oxford to Bicester Town line.