They could, in theory, have offered to pay for electrification but couldn't have "done it" as they don't own the infrastructure. I doubt there has been any revenue surplus (ie net payments to the DfT / Treasury) out of which they could have funded anything like this for many a long year. Also worthwhile remembering that Hull Trains did offer to pay for wiring through to Hull from the ECML and they wre refused permission - so it's not as simple as "evil old GWR not doing anything" - however much you'd like it to be.
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GWR 'Project Churchward'
- Thread starter heathrowrail
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That’s assuming growth is evenly distributed across existing services, and that all services are at full capacity.
It is quite conceivable, for obvious reasons, that growth is much more likely to occur where there is already spare capacity.
In any event, current growth is close to nil.
According to Table 1223 the rolling annual total for passengers for GWR to March 2026 is 5.3% compared to the 12 months to March 2025.
This compares with 4.2% or less (including shrinking) between 2011 and 2020 (note, they're were only 3 quarters in that time over 3% and 7 over 2%) for GWR.
As such, what's the source for current growth being nearly zero?
More recent data.
But presumably not rolling data, since for one quarter to reduce the annual rolling growth from 5.3% to near zero would require passenger numbers to have fallen off a cliff. Of course, if it's just figures for the week commencing 22/06, it would be a miracle if it didn't show a massive drop-off - after all, we were all being advised not to travel for 3 of the 5 days!
To get the rolling 12 month to show a 1.4% growth rate we'd need three April to June data to have fallen from 23.52 million (as recorded in 2025) to 21.80 million (a fall of 7.1% vs Apr-Jun 25 number).
To actually to get to 0% the Apr-Jun 26 number would need to have fallen 12.41% compared with the Apr-Jun 25 number to 20.60 million.
As even repeating the April to June value of 23.52 million would still show a growth rate of 3.2% for GWR.
As you highlight a single quarter can show some unusual figures due to one off events (such is why I tend to look at the 12 month rolling data as it'll smooth out some of those significant shifts.
The table below reproduces the quarterly data with the 12 month rolling total added.
| Period | Quarterly (Millions) | Rolling 12 months * | |
| Jan-Mar 24 | 20.32 | ||
| Apr-Jun 24 | 21.75 | ||
| 22.92 | ||
| 22.53 | 87.52 | |
| 21.83 | 89.03 | |
| Apr-Jun 25 | 23.52 | 90.80 | |
| Jul-Sep 25 | 24.20 | 92.07 | |
| Oct-Dec 25 | 23.79 | 93.34 | |
| Jan-Mar 26 | 22.23 | 93.74 |
* not in the source data and may not quite total the quarterly data shown due to rounding (the source data is to more than 2 decimal points)
It's worth noting that whilst the 12 month rolling value is lower than that for January to December 2019 (102.25 million) or the highest since April 2011 to March 2012 (104.91 million in April 2016 to March 2017), this will be impacted by the shift of local services to fall under Elizabeth Line services during Covid (as I'm lead to believe they're were some peak hour GWR services until May 2023).
This was recorded as 1.6 million fewer passengers for GWR in July to September in 2017 (around 6.3 million for a year), which would put the current 12 month figure at around 100 million for a more useful pre Covid Maximum (I.e. the 104.91 million figure) - although those GWR peak services might still have some impact (although at 2 inbound and 2 outbound, that impact is likely to be limited - maybe up to 0.5 million, but likely much less, and so not material).
year on year. excluding the impact of the heat.