I have - always - been an pragmatic advocate and user of public transport. By which I mean using it where appropriate and available, but accepting that it's not always available or practical.

Which leads me to question things like "what is available", "how good is it for the customers" - both in comparisons across the UK, and what we should expect.  Of particular recent concern has been the reliability of our train service at Melksham, with cancellation rates reaching double figure percentages - five times worse than the target "worst case" under franchising.  Is it like this all over the UK, or are we being shabbily treated?

I was born in Merseyside and my nearest station and first railway memories were of Ainsdale.  Our family moved to North West Kent just before I started school, and I have many memories of travelling by train to school and then to Uni and to temporary jobs by train from Petts Wood. After Uni, I moved to take a permament job in Harpenden, and although I didn't commute from there, I did use the train for work and leisure travel.  And more than half a lifetime ago, I moved to Wiltshire.

I have taken Ainsdale, Petts Wood, Harpenden and Melksham stations and used onTimeTrains to compare the four very different regions.

Populations (estimated station catchment) Ainsdale - 13,000; Petts Wood - 18,000; Melksham - 26,000; Harpenden - 31,000 - However, Melksham only has a fraction of the timetabled services, which means that every cancellation hurts.  On the other had, we laugh off a ten minute delay in Melksham but at Petts Wood we would have already switched (I used to do this!) from the Charing Cross train to the Victoria train ... to get to my temporary job in Whitehall.





First image - last four weekends, ranked by the ontimetrains measure of reliability and cancellations. We noted a couple of good weekends after a "crisis" meeting with GWR but - oh dear - they have slipped back and are significantly worse, again, that the other stations elsewhere in England.

Second image - all days of the week, back to nearly the start of the year.  I have blanked out January because the train service at Melksham was virtually non-existant due to the month long closure of Westbury which makes the figures at onetimetrains statistically insignificant.   The scale on this second diagram are absolute scales and not relative ones - so everyone should be close together near the top of the scale.