I'm fighting to save the train service to Melksham - it's under threat at the very time that its use and the town are growing rapidly - a victim of a complex set of artificial circumstances and decisions that defy logic taken afar.

As part of the my campaign, I am suggesting that a reliable hourly service - that's 15 trains a day - would be used much more than the current service of a third of that, and that the service could be provided from Chippenham to Westbury based on a single coach train shuttling up and down - in other words, much of a muchness in terms of resources. But then I'm asked to make a business case / prove my suggestion. And whatever figures and statistics I come up with, I'm told they're not a proof. Too true - the ONLY proof is in trying it out.

Let's see. Ticket sales are around 70 per day. And a County Council survey has analysed passengers parking at Chippenham station to catch the train - suggesting a figure of 70 people per day doing that. So that's a doubling of traffic straight away is those people would switch to their local train and - people tell me - they WOULD if it was reliable and regular.

Bradford-on-Avon is a town about a half the size of Melksham - it's just 6 miles up the road from us, but railway-wise it's very different - it's on the Cardiff to Portsmouth line and enjoys an hourly service each way, which is the level I'm suggesting for Melksham.

Journeys from Bradford-on-Avon? 10 times those of Melksham (2002/3 ticket sales - the latest I have for BOA - were 220000 v 19000 (now risen to 27400) at Melksham). In other words, the average inhabitant of Bradford on Avon uses the train 20 times more often that the average Melksham person.

I can't offer you, Mr Whitehall, any PROOF that increasing the Melksham train service by a factor of 3 would increase the usage by a factor of 20 - it probably wouldn't. But surely there's evidence to confirm that within the realms of statistical proof it would increase many-fold. And a tripling of the service would NOT involve a tripling of costs. But that's another article and one I'll post elsewhere.

See our Melksham Train website for more details.
(written 2005-12-08 07:38:44)

 

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