The stations that have lost most appear to be Farnborough (2 to 1 fasts), Eastleigh (2 to 1) and Shawford (no London service or reasonable connection).
It is something of a folly that an open access operator can claim a new service is sufficiently lucrative for them to start operations where the DfT can't afford the additional subsidy required to run the same service.
The application indicates that the applicant Alliance Rail (Southern) would pay for the infrastructure work. It would cost less than the RYR proposal for a Southampton to Hythe service. In RYR proposal the trains would serve both Marchwood and Hythe but in this application initially at least the trains will terminate at Marchwood and Totton to Marchwood is already operational for freight trains.
This application also includes a service every two hours to London Waterloo.
Because the money will come from the London extension (utilising 2/3 of the resources, hardly a coincidence).
It asks the question, would they have ever come up with this if SWR were still using the xx39 Waterloo to Poole path all day? DfT should react to this by quickly getting the Waterloo - Poole restored.
Probably because a non stop service from Hook to London Waterloo would be particularly attractive for passengers at Hook as it is the last station but one on the SWR stopping service from London Waterloo to Basingstoke.So they propose to stop at Hook. Logic, or box-ticking?
SWR decided not to restore the pre-pandemic hourly London Waterloo to Poole stopping train because it never worked well with very long waits at Southampton Central and at Brockenhurst. Instead, apart from weekday peaks, in the December 2022 timetable consultation SWR promised separate London Waterloo to Southampton Central and Southampton Central to Bournemouth hourly stopping trains but in the end the former was limited to a Winchester to Southampton Central hourly stopping train which has now been operationally combined with the Southampton Central to Bournemouth and the Southampton Central to Portsmouth and Southsea hourly stopping trains. I suspect the shortage of rolling stock due to the failure to bring the new class 701 Arterio trains into service was one reason. This has left Eastleigh with one train an hour to London Waterloo, the hourly train from Portsmouth Harbour to London Waterloo, as the two fast London Waterloo to Weymouth trains each hour do not call at Eastleigh so this proposed open access service would be likely to attract some passengers at Eastleigh.
I wonder if the plan is for the open-access service to use the xx39 path, to provide balanced service to Eastleigh, or is the idea to run it completely on a competitive basis by attracting "GBR" passengers to it with lower fares, even if it's roughly the same time in the hour as the existing Portsmouth service?
Pre-pandemic the SWR hourly Poole stopping train left London Waterloo at xx39 and arrived at Southampton Central at xx12 then returning from Poole to London Waterloo departed Southampton Central at xx55 waiting at Eastleigh xx06 to xx14 for a fast Weymouth train to pass and arrived at London Waterloo at xx34. Now it departs Southampton Central at xx55 as pre-pandemic has the same wait at Eastleigh and arrives at Winchester at xx24 as pre-pandemic but goes into the Winchester Baltic Siding returning to leave Winchester at xx49 as pre-pandemic and arriving at Southampton Central at xx12 as pre-pandemic. I guess the paths from this pre-pandemic Poole stopping service could be used for an hourly stopping service London Waterloo to Southampton Central as SWR proposed this service for December 2022 but did not go ahead with it. However SWR is continuing to use the parts of the path between Winchester and Southampton for the Southampton to Winchester all stops shuttle that remains from the pre-pandemic Poole to London Waterloo stopping service. It will be interesting to see what timetable Alliance Rail (Southern) propose to run for their two hourly service to and from London Waterloo.
Since they must be from the GWR branded fleet, as the only ones with DC capability, they've never been in action, other than test runs. When they last carried passengers, they were still 319s running on Thameslink.
Ah, thanks, so it was xx12, I knew it was sometime around then.
444s have been diagrammed on one particular stopper towards Portsmouth in the morning peak in the past, and they have had carriage level SDO for some years. Before that I think Portchester might have been a problem for 444s, but that’s history now. I think that a 444 is not an insurmountable problem for the odd train. But if an xx39 Waterloo to Southampton ran all day, wouldn’t some of them be 8 car, like the xx09 services? So they’d possibly need to split at Southampton?
Ah, ok, thanks.
One 'build back better strategy' was meant to be longer trains running slightly less frequently to improve reliability. Where it seems to fall down is that the timetables haven't been recast to even out departure times, which gives rise to views like 'the xx39 is missing'.
I can echo post #43 from @swt_passenger - the stoppers at Bedhampton (its platform capacity is 6x 20m coaches) often have a pair of 444s or three 450s.
It really isn't The economics are completely different. If an OAO operator starts operating between Southampton and London they will be allocated a % of the total revenue for that route. The actual service they provide doesn't have to be profitable in itself. If SWR operated additional services, as they already get 100% of the revenue, if the additional services didn't pay for themselves it would require an additional subsidy.
It has come up before on other applications, where an operator hasn't used certain paths for 4 years since pre covid.
Indeed, it's not necessarily a zero-sum market. If the additional SWR services encouraged the return of some of the passengers that they've driven away over the last seven years, and especially over the last four years, the extra patronage would offset the extra cost. Whether that would be sufficient for the DfT is another matter, but it's more likely to help with the government's professed decarbonisation agenda than the spiral of decline that SWR is currently locked into. I don't use the Southampton line, but the Portsmouth Direct has its worst timetable for decades, with fewer trains, slower trains, and inconvenient uneven gaps every hour.
One man's decline is another man's economic sanity. The number of 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 9/10 empty off-peak rail services running around in this country is absurd, and it has nothing to do with the downturn in passengers post-Covid either. It was exactly the same pre-Covid. Reducing these, and perhaps increasing the number of carriages on the remaining services, is long overdue.
No, but what else is;
Well, with the exception of 935 at Long Marston.
By the time this is running, what is now the SWR operation will be in public hands, so I am not sure why the competence of the current SWR is relevant.
It is the worst timetable since around 1993, certainly, which unusually had just 2tph south of Guildford - and that was a one-off, a result of post-recession cuts. In 1994 there were 3tph to Haslemere (kind of like now) and by 1995 there were 3tph at even 20-min intervals all to Portsmouth, so arguably better than today - plus a kind-of 4th in the form of a Guildford-Haslemere shuttle.
HM Treasury will still have to pay for trains and infrastructure investments for any SWR services on the Waterside Line whereas this open access application offers the Government the opportunity to reintroduce a passenger train service to the Waterside Line without having to spend any public money as the open access operator will pay for the trains and the infrastructure investment needed to run the passenger train service on the Waterside Line. With the current state of public finances I would not be surprised if far from trying to improve SWR services to stop it happening the Government encouraged this open access application behind the scenes as it offers the opportunity of another rail reopening with new train services without spending any public money. I note the Prime Minister's visit to the Hitachi factory to publicise the 500 million pound investment by First Group in 14 new trains for their open access services.
They wouldn't be the very definition of off peak in the slightest. It is a well known fact that Saturday services in many parts of the country are far busier than weekday services and even then they usually aren't what anybody would be described as packed except if there is a special event or sporting fixture or the run up to Christmas. The virtually empty off peak services are the totally pointless ones that run mainly Mon - Fri.
I'd call off-peak any time except Mon-Fri before 10 or 4-7, as well as Saturdays close to Christmas or in the summer or all year if we're talking about travel towards major cities.
Pointless to bean-counters maybe, but not to the people that use them. Unless I'm on the branch train from Lower Throgmorton to Adlestrop, I'm struggling to think of a Mon-Fri off-peak which has been virtually empty. Quiet, yes, relatively speaking - but still with a reasonable number of passengers, say 33-50% full. The solution of course is to run a 4-coach train (or 2-coach if we're talking about "Regional Railways" land) rather than completely cancel it.
