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Topic: If ever there was a case for needing the train... (Read 2332 times)
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Nick Field
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Had a day off work last Thursday. The other half and I had a day out, and due to the fact that we had several stops to make in Wiltshire and Dorset and had to bulky items to carry we decided to travel by car. On the way back home I made the mistake of taking the A350 back up to Chippenham during rush hour. The traffic was horrendous. On approach to the Roundabout at Yarnbrook there was traffic queing back for about half a mile, then once passed that we had to queue again to get through the West Ashton crossroads with cars nose to tail. All in all in took about 40 mins to travel about one mile! From there on up through Melksham and up to Chippenham it was ok but pretty slow moving a great deal of cars on the road. It just goes to show what an opportunity there is to promote modal shift, but how is that going to happen with no trains?
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Graham Ellis
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The more and more I see / hear / listen to, the more I realise that the criteria for keeping the service into the future are odd ones. Even if a service is financially viable, it doesn't mean that it will be run ...
The criteria for the new frachise are
1. Minimise goivernment financial input or (better) maximise the return for them and
2. Run a higher proportion of trains on time.
If there's a less ambition timetable, then there's a better chance of running trains on time ...
The other issue that's rearing its ugly head seems to be a lack of rolling stock. I was at the West Wilts Rail User Group meeting last Friday, and there was talk of overcrowding on some trains ... to the extent that Wessex Trains have had to lay on a daily bus in one instance to supplement a train. They simply don't have the stock to stengthen the existing train.
It's said that adding the 1-coach Melksham train onto an overcrowded Cardiff to Portsmouth service would cause more people to travel on it that do if it's on "the TransWilts". Let's see ... 240 people crammed into a 2 coach train. Strenghten it to 3 coaches and each coach then conveys 80, which is MORE than it would be carrying on our line. The fallacy in this argument is that the people to be carried if it's reassigned would be using the train anyway ... whereas withdrawing it from the line through Melksham WOULD loose the railway business. But's that's the mentality we're fighting.
By the way ... even the lunctime train was reported as having 26 passengers from Trowbridge to Melksham the other day ...
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