Train punctuality: is it really that important?

[Mattyfez]

What you're talking about there though is more an intercity train, not a local commuter. Two different things.

[pete75]

What you're talking about there though is more an intercity train, not a local commuter. Two different things.

It's the train most rail commuters in these parts seem to use. Stations like Grantham and P'boro packed at morning commuting times to London. Bugger all folk going the other way though. 50 mins P'boro to London 1hr 10 mins from Grantham - I suppose that's quicker than a lot of the slow commuter trains in the south east and it's a fairly reliable service as well. Only public transport I could get to work is abus and that takes 46 minutes to do just 20 miles though it does stop between 10 and 15 times in that relatively short distance so I suppose it's not so bad.

[mjr]

But there's a reason why Lincolnshire has a pretty poor road casualty rate, isn't there?

Poor - it's the best in the country. We come top every year - you can't do better than that.

A county with cycling casualties increasing so much faster than the national average is not "the best in the country" by the measure that matters on this forum - the purple line is the national average and the orange line is Lincs:

(from https://beyondthekerb.org.uk/2016/09/23 ... ons-share/ by bez)

6 places big enough to have a railway station in just 25 miles???

Not that unusual is it? Even in Cambridgeshire, about 20 miles gives you Littleport, Ely, Waterbeach, Cambridge North, Cambridge City and Shelford. The quietest of those (Shelford) serves 175000 uses a year.

In my experience yes it is. Train from Grantham to Leeds for example, Newark, Retford, Donny, Wakefield .

Well, yes, if your experience is a bit of the East Coast Main Line which has been gutted of most of its stations: Barkston, Hougham, Claypole, Carlton-on-Trent, Crow Park, Dukeries Junction, Tuxford North, Barnby Moor and Sutton, Ranskill, Scrooby, Bawtry and Rossington stations all gone before you get to Doncaster.

There's places round here which are a bit small to have a station -SLeaford , Spalding , Stamford and the like.

Sleaford and Stamford are both towns of about 22'000 generating about 350k trips. Ironically, Spalding is the largest of those three at 30'000, but generates under 200k trips, probably because it has the weakest service. Boston's even bigger but also under 200k and served by one pootling diesel route. Then you look at the stations I listed and Waterbeach is a village of just 5000 people, but the station is busier than any of those, with its 4-car electric trains serving over 400k users a year. A bit small to have a station? The likes of Sleaford are a bit big to have such poor service!

[pete75]

But there's a reason why Lincolnshire has a pretty poor road casualty rate, isn't there?

Poor - it's the best in the country. We come top every year - you can't do better than that.

A county with cycling casualties increasing so much faster than the national average is not "the best in the country" by the measure that matters on this forum - the purple line is the national average and the orange line is Lincs:

(from https://beyondthekerb.org.uk/2016/09/23 ... ons-share/ by bez)

irony

Well, yes, if your experience is a bit of the East Coast Main Line which has been gutted of most of its stations: Barkston, Hougham, Claypole, Carlton-on-Trent, Crow Park, Dukeries Junction, Tuxford North, Barnby Moor and Sutton, Ranskill, Scrooby, Bawtry and Rossington stations all gone before you get to Doncaster.

You really think the main line could operate very well with trains stopping at all those tiny places? They were probably needed before motorised road transport but many lost their passengers to motor buses started to operate. Some were closed over 80 years and the war helped some to hang on but I'd guess all were closed to passengers before Beeching.They were often a mile or more from the village whose name they used whereas the buses went through the village centres. The main reason for a lot of smaller stations and indeed many railways was for freight with passengers as more or less a sideline. Once that freight was lost to the roads stations went as did quite a few lines.

Sleaford and Stamford are both towns of about 22'000 generating about 350k trips. Ironically, Spalding is the largest of those three at 30'000, but generates under 200k trips, probably because it has the weakest service. Boston's even bigger but also under 200k and served by one pootling diesel route. Then you look at the stations I listed and Waterbeach is a village of just 5000 people, but the station is busier than any of those, with its 4-car electric trains serving over 400k users a year. A bit small to have a station? The likes of Sleaford are a bit big to have such poor service!

Oh yeah they really need those services - it's not unusual for Spalding Sleaford trains to have only one or two passengers. The main function of the Spalding, Sleaford Lincoln line is to keep freight traffic off the mainline. I suspect the cost per passenger is high and takes subsidy which would be better used for local bus services which are far more useful in an area with many small, scattered settlements and which have been cut back quite heavily with withdrawal of county council funds since 2008. Railways are an expensive and inflexible way to provide public transport in sparsely populated rural areas.

Waterbeach is mainly a big housing estate, a dormitory settlement with many people leaving each day to work in Cambridge a place with notoriously poor and expensive parking so the station will get a lot of commuter use. Boston, Spalding and Sleaford are centres of employment not dormitory towns so don't really have large numbers of people commuting out each morning except for people working on the land and train travel certainly wouldn't work for them.

[mjr]

You really think the main line could operate very well with trains stopping at all those tiny places?

Maybe not all of them, but some of them. Four-track it, so there are fast and stopping lines like further south on the same main line.

I suspect the cost per passenger is high and takes subsidy which would be better used for local bus services which are far more useful in an area with many small, scattered settlements and which have been cut back quite heavily with withdrawal of county council funds since 2008. Railways are an expensive and inflexible way to provide public transport in sparsely populated rural areas.

Waterbeach is mainly a big housing estate, a dormitory settlement with many people leaving each day to work in Cambridge a place with notoriously poor and expensive parking so the station will get a lot of commuter use. Boston, Spalding and Sleaford are centres of employment not dormitory towns so don't really have large numbers of people commuting out each morning except for people working on the land and train travel certainly wouldn't work for them.

I suspect all the above is another joke.

[pete75]

Waterbeach is mainly a big housing estate, a dormitory settlement with many people leaving each day to work in Cambridge a place with notoriously poor and expensive parking so the station will get a lot of commuter use. Boston, Spalding and Sleaford are centres of employment not dormitory towns so don't really have large numbers of people commuting out each morning except for people working on the land and train travel certainly wouldn't work for them.

I suspect all the aboveis another joke.

Maybe you could explain why it's wrong to describe Waterbeach as a dormitory settlement or Cambridge as having poor and expensive car parking facilities. While you're at it you could maybe explain the wrongness in my saying places like Boston and Sleaford are not dormitory towns.

[mjr]

I'm sorry - your punctuation (or lack of) made me think you were serious.

Not being able to recognise my irony in describing a place that's top of the charts for road deaths per head of population as the best in the country shows you take things too literally. Do you suffer from Asperger's or just need to lighten up a bit? Oh and try and correct your own punctuation before criticising others.

I'll assume you don't mean any of that literally and I'm glad that you find road casualties a good topic for levity(!)

Maybe you could explain why it's wrong to describe Waterbeach as a dormitory settlement or Cambridge as having poor and expensive car parking facilities. While you're at it you could maybe explain the wrongness in my saying places like Boston and Sleaford are not dormitory towns.

It costs £1 a day to park a car in some council car parks in Cambridge and they're vast and easy to reach from the entry roads - so neither poor nor expensive IMO. I realise that if you insist on parking all day right in among the colleges, it's much more expensive, but the city quite rightly has decided to discourage driving into the small and bustling old centre.

You're basically right about Boston not being much of a dormitory though, although I suspect that's because it's not well-connected to much. I said there was lots of wrongness in your post, not that absolutely everything in it was wrong.

But Sleaford is a dormitory for Lincoln, Grantham and Boston. See the bright red flows on http://commute.datashine.org.uk/#mode=a ... at=52.9809 - if you flip the "Mode" selector, you'll see that most of those are driving cars, so if it had better train services, that would probably mean less busy roads.

[pete75]

Maybe you could explain why it's wrong to describe Waterbeach as a dormitory settlement or Cambridge as having poor and expensive car parking facilities. While you're at it you could maybe explain the wrongness in my saying places like Boston and Sleaford are not dormitory towns.

It costs £1 a day to park a car in some council car parks in Cambridge and they're vast and easy to reach from the entry roads - so neither poor nor expensive IMO. I realise that if you insist on parking all day right in among the colleges, it's much more expensive, but the city quite rightly has decided to discourage driving into the small and bustling old centre.

The car parks you're talking about are not in Cambridge at all. They're outside in places like Milton , Fen Ditton and Madingley.

But Sleaford is a dormitory for Lincoln, Grantham and Boston. See the bright red flows on http://commute.datashine.org.uk/#mode=a ... at=52.9809 - if you flip the "Mode" selector, you'll see that most of those are driving cars, so if it had better train services, that would probably mean less busy roads.

Sleaford's not a dormitory for those places, of course some people travel outside the town to work elsewhere but that doesn't make it a dormitory town which is a place from which mots people travel outwith to work. If you look at the traffic flows in Sleaford you'll see most commuting journeys are within the town itself.
I'd question the validity of the data represented on that map because it shows no commuting whatsoever between Sleaford and RAF Cranwell even though many military and civilian staff from the base live in the town. It's not because they leave off travel to military bases because journeys from Sleaford to Waddington and Coningsby RAF bases are shown.

Most of the places people travel to have no rail connection to the town.

[mjr]

Maybe you could explain why it's wrong to describe Waterbeach as a dormitory settlement or Cambridge as having poor and expensive car parking facilities. While you're at it you could maybe explain the wrongness in my saying places like Boston and Sleaford are not dormitory towns.

It costs £1 a day to park a car in some council car parks in Cambridge and they're vast and easy to reach from the entry roads - so neither poor nor expensive IMO. I realise that if you insist on parking all day right in among the colleges, it's much more expensive, but the city quite rightly has decided to discourage driving into the small and bustling old centre.

The car parks you're talking about are not in Cambridge at all. They're outside in places like Milton , Fen Ditton and Madingley.

But they are still good and cheap car parks for Cambridge, with easy transport links (including cycling) to it - not "poor and expensive" at all. Cambridge has made sensible decisions to encourage people not to drive into it unless they really need to - I think that's commendable and I wish more places would. Can anyone really not imagine how much nicer would Stamford's Georgian heart be without the near-permanent queues on the Great North Road? (or whatever it's called locally?)

I'd question the validity of the data represented on that map because it shows no commuting whatsoever between Sleaford and RAF Cranwell even though many military and civilian staff from the base live in the town.

Yes, I'm sure the census for Lincolnshire was wrong.

Most of the places people travel to have no rail connection to the town.

And that's a flaw, not a feature.

[AndyK]

A county with cycling casualties increasing so much faster than the national average is not "the best in the country" by the measure that matters on this forum - the purple line is the national average and the orange line is Lincs:

(from https://beyondthekerb.org.uk/2016/09/23 ... ons-share/ by bez)

Nitpicky point: No it isn't. As the legend on the graph says, the purple lines show the Lincolnshire rates for all cyclist casualties, while the orange lines show the rates just for KSI (killed-or-seriously-injured) cyclist casualties - again, just for Lincolnshire.

All the figures are indexed against the national average for 2005-2015, so in the scale on the Y axis, "100" is "right on the average" and less than 100 is "better than average". That's where the national average comes in.

So all those lines relate to Lincolnshire's figures, and are an indication of whether Lincolnshire is "better" or "worse" than the national picture. As the original article says,

Plotting the data relative to the national average makes Lincolnshire’s performance clearer: whilst the purple all-casualties trend line is virtually flat, the orange KSI trend line runs from around 80% to 120%—meaning KSIs are rising at about 1.5 times the national average.

This is explained in the original article, though not very clearly. Personally, given the wild fluctuations in the KSI figures, I wouldn't put too much faith in that nice neat "exponential" red line. You could easily argue that the data show a drastic reduction in KSI rates after 2012.

[al_yrpal]

Perhaps Horizon would like to post his design proposal for a replacement Reading Station? Or, is he just a huff and puff merchant? It's too easy to be against everything, particularly in terms of design. What all critics usually lack is better proposals that will actually work within budget. It's my local station and it works brilliantly.

How about making Tower Bridge a dual carriageway?

Al

[pete75]

Can anyone really not imagine how much nicer would Stamford's Georgian heart be without the near-permanent queues on the Great North Road? (or whatever it's called locally?)

The Great North Road is now called the A1 locally. It bypassed the town in the early sixties.

I'd question the validity of the data represented on that map because it shows no commuting whatsoever between Sleaford and RAF Cranwell even though many military and civilian staff from the base live in the town.

Yes, I'm sure the census for Lincolnshire was wrong.

If it shows no commuting between Sleaford and RAF Cranwell then you're right - it is.

Most of the places people travel to have no rail connection to the town.

And that's a flaw, not a feature.[/quote]

Hardly - look at the spread of where people travel to and perhaps explain how this "flaw" could be overcome. Who will finance a railway line between Sleaford and Hough on the Hill or pay to reinstate the Sleaford Bourne line which had so few passengers it shut to all but freight over eighty years ago.

[mjr]

A county with cycling casualties increasing so much faster than the national average is not "the best in the country" by the measure that matters on this forum - the purple line is the national average and the orange line is Lincs:

Nitpicky point: No it isn't. As the legend on the graph says, the purple lines show the Lincolnshire rates for all cyclist casualties, while the orange lines show the rates just for KSI (killed-or-seriously-injured) cyclist casualties - again, just for Lincolnshire.

Good spot. Apologies. I think I confused it with this graph from an earlier article.


Oh well, at least the gist was right:

meaning KSIs are rising at about 1.5 times the national average

or tl;dr: Lincolnshire is pretty poor. I say that with no malice because my local group wants to help change things in South Holland and it's going worse than most districts

[mjr]

Can anyone really not imagine how much nicer would Stamford's Georgian heart be without the near-permanent queues on the Great North Road? (or whatever it's called locally?)

The Great North Road is now called the A1 locally. It bypassed the town in the early sixties.

Not the modern monstrosity. Apparently the bit I was thinking of is called St Mary's Hill and High Street St Martins.

Most of the places people travel to have no rail connection to the town.

And that's a flaw, not a feature.

Hardly - look at the spread of where people travel to and perhaps explain how this "flaw" could be overcome. Who will finance a railway line between Sleaford and Hough on the Hill or pay to reinstate the Sleaford Bourne line which had so few passengers it shut to all but freight over eighty years ago.

Well, we can now do things with light rail and trams and so on which weren't options over eighty years ago. Technology moves on. It doesn't have to be a railway line but any better transport solutions than single-occupancy motor vehicles... but you're right in a way: no investment will happen while local people keep swearing blind that the car is king (or more politically acceptable, that "cars are essential" or junk like that), insist on subsidising town-centre tarmac wastelands of free car parking (which Sleaford still did when I last visited - admittedly not that recently, because there's not much there to attract visitors) and demonise forward-thinking successful places like Cambridge and London which have taken some steps towards more sustainable transport.

[pete75]

Well, we can now do things with light rail and trams and so on which weren't options over eighty years ago. Technology moves on. It doesn't have to be a railway line but any better transport solutions than single-occupancy motor vehicles... but you're right in a way: no investment will happen while local people keep swearing blind that the car is king (or more politically acceptable, that "cars are essential" or junk like that), insist on subsidising town-centre tarmac wastelands of free car parking (which Sleaford still did when I last visited - admittedly not that recently, because there's not much there to attract visitors) and demonise forward-thinking successful places like Cambridge and London which have taken some steps towards more sustainable transport.

Eighty years ago there were many trams and light railways so they were options back then. The heath north of Sleaford had a very extensive light railway system serving large potato farms and there were massive tram networks all over the industrial north and Midlands. Not real solutions for rural public transport though. Anyway but a rail fixated fanatic should realise that the only feasible way to provide a decent public transport system in the countryside is a good bus service.

It must have been a long time ago when you visited Sleaford because there hasn't been free parking in the town centre for a long time. Rather than being a wasteland the one in the centre is actually the Market Place. Most market towns have them. There's even two in Lynn and certainly the one in in front of the Duke's Head is used for parking. As markets are only held on one or two days a week it makes sense to have another use for the market place else it really would be a wasteland.

You obviously dislike car usage, others don't. I hope you don't have a car yourself otherwise you'd be a hypocrite wouldn't you?