Right - But how many passengers used Newquay last summer, and TWO summers ago (with 5 a day) how many used Melksham?

Newquay trains all year round are well loaded!

My point is thought, that although the numbers fluctuate, on average I'd call it Newquay with higher loadings......

Those two (well - actually 06:40 now) are current timings and the train runs as part of another diagram in each case.  In a way, the 05:2x from Gloucester leaves Swindon at 16:15 as -in essence - something closely resembling an empty stock working - but it does pick up at Chippenham and Melksham before joining the Southampton and Portsmouth line at Trowbridge, and starting from Chippenham gathers commuters headed south.  There is an irony in that it leaves Swindon so early there isn't even a London connection available.   The 07:17 is surprisingly robust in its loading, although numbers joining at Melksham are pathetic at the moment.

However, I advocate adding to the service and not moving this one.   The biggest problem you'll learn about when you talek to the users of the service is not the time as such, but the huge gap to the return service - and if there were return services back from Swindon at (say) 3:30 and 5:30 then the loadings would improve.   Add in an extra service that gets to Swindon for around half past eight in the morning and heads south again shortly thereafter and you provide a morning choice whihc gives further good opportunities for these other new trains - and so it grows.   So odd though it may seem, there's a very strong encouragement to retain the existing service and add to it to make it useful rather than to take a way the bits which are odd on their own.

Another reason - the morning service is run on the cheap. I understand that it's not possible to use a single crew for morning and afternoon peak trains due to shift lengths, shich means you have a changeover in the middle of the day. So you can already have the driver and conductor available on shift anyway from around 5 a.m.

In terms of current resiliance, you may wonder why there is so much through traffic on that 07:02 from Westbury.   I understand that Westbury and Trowbridge to Chippenham and Swindon passengers, while not happy with it, have switched to going via Bath at the end of the day there's no suitable through train for them.   The train operating company is laughing all the way to the bank over this - it seems that far more people are prepared to put up with an extra 30 minutes, a change that is very unreliable whenever there are delays or cancellations, and standing to the South of Bath than they had every dreamed, and that some through journey figures are actually up.  In my view, this shows a fair degree of contempt for the passenger - but we've always been aware that the passenger is not treated with the same degree of respect by the railway industry as is the customer in other walks of life.