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November 30, 2005
Keeping the campaign tail up
I was delighted to get a call from the Wiltshire Times yesterday evening ... looking for an update on "Save the Train" and one or two other things. Hopefully we'll get a few more mentions in the next edition or two. I had been expecting new visitors to this web site to tail off as the story got older - it's a tough to keep something in the headlines - but on the contrary I have noticed that the new visitors to the front page that I log are getting more-per-week not less. We're getting on the map.
On a purely personal (and own work) level, it's been a quiet week train-wise for me. For that last couple of weeks "the station run" was almost daily with customers arriving and leaving, but this week we're running rather different private stuff and it's not bringing the train traffic.
Posted by gje at 06:16 AM | Comments (0)
November 25, 2005
STILL worth writing. To MP, To Dft, to bidders.
[i]" I have been meaning to write to my MP about this for a while now, and your site has spurred me into action."[/i] .... quoted with permission.
Excellent. Internally at Department for Transport, the decision has probably been made already as to who is to operate our train (or if we can do better trains, plural) for the next seven years. [b]But as the service levels and timetables are fine tuned, it can do nothing but good for the parties concerned to continually be reminded just how important the TransWilts service that provides the ONLY rail service to the growing town of Melksham is. That ticket sales are up, up, up - all be it from a very low point five years ago ... and so on.[/b]
In fact ... it's probably more important that the successful bidder gets some updates from us over the next couple of months as they negotiate / plan details.
Posted by gje at 07:50 AM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2005
A bustle before the 17:02
I seem to have spent all my week on pickup / dropoff runs for the station .... our training course today was attended by six people ... only two drove, three had arrived (and left) by train, and we offered the final one a lift to Bristol Airport. The station was brutally windswept and cold when I dropped our customers off there a few minutes before the 17:02 .... I didn't know whether to laugh of cry when I saw that our little shelter was already filled with numerous people waiting for the train!
Posted by gje at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2005
Plus a footnote - Melksham to London
Addition to yesterday's Melksham - London - Melksham timetable
The 07:41 service to London that arrives at 11:15 is the National Express Coach - although it's not a train I've included it in the timetable as it does provide a hassle-free alternative route to London to the train. I have NOT included local buses to Chippenham and train connections from there, since most people don't want to struggle of local buses and onto trains with a need (in Chippenham) to haul their luggage over the footbridge.
Oh - and am I right in thinking that the 234 bus still does NOT serve Chippenham station even though there's what must be an expensive new bus interchange there?
Posted by gje at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2005
Timetable - Melksham to Reading and London
Many people find the timetable sheets displayed at the station hard to follow ... so I've put together a summary set for the new schedule (from 10th December). Timetable link here - separate sections for Swindon to Southampton via Melskam, for Melksham to Bath and Bristol, and for Melksham to London. Here's a sample:
| Melksham | 05:52 | 07:45 | 07X41 | 09:12 | 13:35 | 14:49 | 17:02 | 18:09 | 21:33 |
| change | Swin. | Swin. | - | West. | Swin. | West. | Swin. | West. | Swin. |
| Reading | 07:03 | 09:07 | - | 10:52 | 14:45 | 17:38 | 18:10 | 20:09 | 22:53 |
| Gatwick | 09R02 | 10R49 | - | 12R20 | 16R49 | 18R29 | 19R49 | 21R39 | 01R00 |
| London | 07:31 | 09:20 | 11V15 | 11:24 | 15:15 | 18:10 | 18:44 | 20:36 | 23:34 |
Posted by gje at 05:19 PM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2005
What does it cost to run a train?
I use the train. I've done so all my 50 years ... from commuting to school in the London suburbs from the age of 7 right through to taking the train into Bristol a week or two back. I've been shocked at some fares that I feel are extortionate (open return, Chippenham to London , 90 pounds, springs to mind) and delighted at the good value of others (3 quid from Keynsham into Bristol recently). But I've taken the finances for granted - I've never though whether I'm paying less of more than the service costs to provide. Such figures are hard to come by.
What have I learnt? By heresay, by mental arithemetic and more, I can draw you up a balance sheet for running a single coach train on (and dedicated to) the Westbury to Chippenham-or-Swindon route.
Hire of train 100000 (one hundred thousand) pounds per year
Staffing 250000 (quarter of a million) pounds per year
Track access charges and fuel 100000 (one hundred thousand) pounds per year
Other costs - say 50000 (fifty thousand) pounds per year.
The top three figures were given to me as the major, encompassing expenses so I think that servicing, replacement vehicle when in for major service, etc are included. My final 50k is a bit of contingency.
Now - let's take a traffic level of 75000 passengers per annum (my current estimate is above this based on Melksham ticket sales and the proportion of people staying on / getting off the train) and you have an income, at 8 pounds per journey (current prices - 9.60 single, Westbury to Swindon; 6.80, single, Melksham to Swindon), of 600,000 pounds - or a profit of 20%.
But this is the cost for the train on Westbury - Chippenham or Swindon full time; that's allowing for another four round trips a day (to Swindon) or a total of about 15 journeys a day (hourly) Westbury to Chippneham both of whihc would give a higher income.
So why isn't this service being run for a profit?
1. It is - I don't think Wessex trains is subsidised except for 1 train a day at the moment.
2. They want to keep rolling stock requirements and main line occupation down under the new franchise
3. There's so much extra paperwork and admin that I haven't costed
4. As things stand, under the distribution of income for this line only 40% goes to the company running the service. The other 60% goes to the company running the London to Bristol service under a knock for knock agreement known as orcat
Point 4 is a "killer". The service takes 600000 pounds. It costs 500000 to run. But the company running it is only allowed to have 240000 pounds of the money it takes.
Please, dear knowledgable readers (I know there are a few of you there), send me feedback and corrections to this expose. It's probably not a suprise, but these figures aren't exactly published and easily to hand!
Posted by gje at 03:52 PM | Comments (2)
November 15, 2005
A THOUSAND visitors
I'm not a great one for page counts on web sites - the last thing you want to be told when you visit Tesco is that you're their 1000-th customer that day. However, I made an excpetion on this site by putting a visitor counter on our front page so that anyone (including you, and including any represenatives, officials and decision makers who come by) can get a realistic impression of the interest that this one personal site alone has generated.
Ladies and Gentlemen, in just three months from a standing start, we've had over 1000 DIFFERENT visitors here. "There was little reaction when we published our consultation document" say the folks who put out the invitation to tender for the Greater Western Franchise, and who am I to doubt them? But perhaps that was because the withdrawal of the TransWilts service was hidden deep in a long document which (in its web form at least) was at an obscure URL. Did you know that papers published in September under Freedom of Information even reported discussion between various groups of civil servants as to how they could lessen the reaction to consultation!
I put it to you that a thousand visitors to this site represents many more who would be interested too if they had stumbled across it (it's just my private site, remember, with a domain name I registered for 2 quid and worked on by my wife and I!), and many many more who aren't on line and looking.
27000 tickets sold last year ....
A nearly full train last Wednesday when I was last at the station ...
Queueing in thge tourist information behind people booking for the Santa special ...
Please, Mr Whitehall, be brave and actually respond to the interest and give us the service that we're crying out for and which I'm sure you know, in your heart, WILL continue to boom.
Posted by gje at 11:27 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2005
Forum Archives available
The forum archives are now available for you to browse from an index page, with the most recent listed first.
Posted by gje at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2005
Busy train at Melksham
Station pickup of a customer yesterday morning ... off the 09:12 arrival from Swindon. And the train was packed - not QUITE standing but nearly so; I estimate that there were 50 passenger or so. Another statistic to add to the pot!
But, seriously, why so busy? I understand that a train had broken down on the main line, and passengers from Chippenham to Bath and Bristol were travelling via the Swindon to Southampton service as far as Trowbridge and changing there onto the Portsmouth to Bristol and Cardiff line.
Is it fair to include this use in our statistics then? Yes, absolutely it is. It's not the first time that the line has been used for diversions such as this, and I'm sure it won't be the last. And is we started excluding exceptional days (either because they're especially quiet or busy) from our logs, then we're not painting a true overall picture. Yesterday, those travellers on the line who are NOT regulars were using and valuing it every bit as much as the regulars.
Posted by gje at 05:06 AM | Comments (0)
November 08, 2005
Monday morning, Melksham Station
Monday morning saw me down at the station to meet a client off the morning train from Swindon (one of the one's that's threatened, remember) and it was heartening to see half a dozen people getting off and four getting on. Not great numbers, but a great deal more that I would have dreamed of seeing there even a couple of years ago.
Did I tell you that the new Greater Westerrn Francishe bidders have been requested to draw up their plans for the next 7 years based on an average traffic growth of between 1% and 2% per annum? Did I tell you that ticket sales from Melksham (the only statistic that anyone's able to quote me to cover entire periods not just snapshots) have risen by a compound average of 50% per year for the past 5 years (3000 to 27000)? Did you hear that apporval has just been given for another 750 new houses to be built in Melksham?
Posted by gje at 06:23 AM | Comments (0)
November 06, 2005
Some scenes at Melksham Station
Many thanks to Melksham Historic Society and Tony Seagers for old pictures of Melksham station. I'm putting a couple of them here with this post and other will be sprinkled throught the site - the idea is that you're going to look around and find them ;-)
Melksham Station was opened in 1847, closed in 1966, reopened in 1985. I've now got pictures of all of those (I question the 1847 picture - were there photographs THAT early?). There isn't quite the threat of complete re-closure at the moment, but the threat to decimate the service would - in my view - take usage back to 2001 levels of 3000 ticket sales per year as against current levels or around 8 times that, and that represents 20000+ journeys, per year, forced onto the roads that are already more than busy. If each of 20000 people takes an extra half hour on their journey, it represents 416 days of people's time being wasted ... and remember that's only the people who leave or join the train at Melksham!
The top picture here shows "The Flying Scotsman" - the engine, not the train, approaching Melksham on a special excursion. I don't know the date, but it was probably just after 1960.
The second picture was take perhaps 12 years later. The station had closed and beel demolished with just platforms left. One of the two running lines had been taken out of service, but the additional track hadn't been lifted - at least through the station.
Posted by gje at 06:03 PM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2005
A disappointing letter
I've just received a copy of a letter signed by Derek Twigg, the Minister with responsibility for rail at the Depratment for Transport in which he states that the line through Melksham is lightly used, and that they are looking to match supply with demand.
As a newcomer to this role in May, it wasn't Mr Twigg who made the original decision and I'm taking the view that he's simply regurgitating old figures, so I've dropped him a note pointing out that traffic has grown by eight TIMES in 5 years, and if it continued at that rate the train would be overcrowded halfway through the period of the next frachnise. I've also asked him to define "lightly used"; his boss Alastair Darling defined it as being 2 users per train a while ago ... we currently have over 10 times than number ...
Posted by gje at 04:25 PM | Comments (1)