And if 10 passengers got on Melksham, and only 1 Melksham passenger got off at Chippenham, it also shows that the Melksham folks want to travel to Swindon if the service timings allow it.
The amazing thing is just
how many people want to travel up from West Wiltshire to Chippenham / Swindon ... and just how many of them would use a service which was just one-train-doing-round-trips more frequent.
Just this morning, I was buying papers at the garage (garage -> petrol -> car bias, you would think) and one of the assistants came oer and asked me how we were getting on. His sister works in Swindon, and occasionally uses the train ... "but the day is so long when she does that she often has to drive" - he cited an arrival at 07:50 and a departure at 18:45 as simply too long a time at destination for a working day, ... so there's yet
another example of someone who would be using the train - and very likely one of the existing trains - if there was a true peak service up in the morning and a true peak service down in the evening.
In other words, adding trains would boost passengers on existing trains too, and quite dramatically. How dramatically? Well - the no. of journeys per head of population in the catchment for Melksham station is currently under 2, based on ticket sales figures, and for the other West Wiltshire towns is in the 20 to 50 range. Taking a very modest figure of 10, you get 220,000 journeys per annum which spread across 3800 trains per annum calling gives you 50 on/off the average train. And with a class "153" train on the line, and the other traffic which would grow in a similar way, you're looking at - can you believe this - overcrowding issues in a couple of years!
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