The headline “Storm forces closure of the West’s lifeline” in The Times of 6th Feb 2014, is somewhat overdone. Here is the reality:
Penzance to Paddington provides one train an hour (11 all day). The journey takes five and a half hours. The open return costs over £120. The typical passenger load on South Western Trains is a 140 people [1].
Torquay to Exeter (through Dawlish) offers three trains per hour. However, a recent picture on TV showed a train with only two carriages on the affected stretch.
Instead of this railway being a “lifeline” it is instead an extraordinarily expensive, fully working, modernised, transport museum.
Further, it is amusing to note that the money now earmarked for the flood defences in the area, amounts to perhaps £130 million or nearly 400 times less than the £50bn required for HS2, a scheme which, far from being transformational, will increase the nation’s passenger journeys by a vanishingly small 0.05%[2].
The flood defences may very well be very much more transformational than that.
Paul Withrington
Footnotes
1] ORR Data shows First Great Western averages 140 passengers per train
[2] HS2 is now said to generates some 76,000 passengers per day, (FoI request), corresponding to roughly 22.8 million per year. It is only those which can be “transformational”, since all the rest exist already. In contrast there are currently 1.5 billion passenger journeys per year by surface rail, and 43.5bn passenger journeys by all modes. Hence, HS2’s supposed generated traffic amounts to 1.5% of all surface rail journeys and to 0.05%, or one in 2,000, of all passenger journeys. Transformational? HA, HA.
Transport Watch 
Reblogged this on Transport-Watch.