March to Wisbech Re-opening

[Forward!]

15 hours ago, Northmoor said:

Also worth adding that bus usage is a poor predictor of potential train travel demand.  There are a lot of people in the UK who have a social snobbery about buses and would never dream of travelling on one, but will use a train.

 

For working people it's usually that the bus services are completely impractical. I could take a bus (well, two actually) from my rural Oxfordshire village to my office in Oxford. But I would have to leave the house at about 07:30 to get to the office for 09:30. If I wanted to get into work at say, 08:00, I simply couldn't. The earliest buses wouldn't get me there in time.

 

Instead, I drive five miles to the nearest railway station (on the Cotswold Line) and then it's a 15 minute train ride straight into Oxford. It's the difference between a door-to-door journey of 2 hours by bus or 40 minutes by car/train! 

[KingEdwardII]

59 minutes ago, Forward! said:

For working people it's usually that the bus services are completely impractical

Not just working people. I'm old enough to have a bus pass and there is a bus service from near our village to Winchester which enables us to catch the train to London. However, we have only used this once in recent times and instead much prefer to use our car to get to the station, even though this involves a hefty parking charge. The buses are simply not that covenient and when we did use the bus on that one occasion, we ended up sitting twiddling our thumbs for nearly an hour at Winchester station waiting for the next bus.

 

Yours, Mike.

[KingEdwardII]

The problem with a connection from Wisbech to March is that the trains from March to Cambridge don't look like they are set up for commuting. The service is 1 per hour, with no extra rush hour trains - and they only stop at the main Cambridge station, not Cambridge North (Cambridge South does not exist yet). They take 33 mins between Cambridge and March, which is good, but the number of folk using the train to commute currently cannot be that large given the limited availability of trains.

 

Wisbech is larger than March (~30K vs ~20K poulations), but you'd probably need a direct Wisbech - March - Ely - Cambridge North - Cambridge - Cambridge South service in the rush hours to make it appealing to commuters from Wisbech. It would make sense from the perspective of relieving housing pressure on the immediate vicinity of Cambridge.

 

Yours, Mike.