Reopen the Carmarthen to Aber line? They've got no chance, IMHO. It is costing £350m to reopen the Borders line from Gala to Edinburgh and the main structures are still extant. To reopen that you'd have to spend upwards of £600m!
Oh, the demand is there between Carmarthen and Aberystwyth. The repeated petitions, passenger numbers of 117,830 in 2008/9 on the TrawsCambria X40 and the fact Arriva decided they could probably operate it commertially all point to that.That is the re-opening I would like to see above all others (except, perhaps, Ruabon to Barmouth via Llangollen) but it's impossible because much of the original trackbed has been redeveloped. The local councillors who support the campaign are living in fantasy land.
The two towns are only 50 miles apart, and connected by a decent road, so although it pains me to say it the obvious solution would be a better bus service. But it appears that there is simply not enough demand to sustain such a link.
I agree that the obvious solution would be a better bus service, ideally one that acts as part of the rail network and challenges the "rail sometimes beats car, bus never does" mentality, but sadly that doesn't seem possible right now because of Arriva's commertial activities on the corridor.
The Welsh Government had been planning improvements, six buses were even ordered for the project but it seems all but one have now been diverted to other routes (three to increase capacity on the Newtown - Cardiff service and two to Cardiff Airport). The sixth is apparently still in store, but I have no confirmation on that one.
Given the importance of the corridor and the failure to deliver a decent bus service I do feel frustrated and think other options should be explored. Unfortunately, the rail option (particularly if you do it properly and iron out the kinks to speed it up) is probably prohibitively expensive. I do think they should at least do a basic study to identify route options and the journey times these would deliver to see if the time savings over the bus would be worth further work.
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Oh, TrawsCambria passenger numbers table (reproduced from here):
X50
- (2007/8) 51,824
- (2008/9) 54,682
- (2009/10) 59,001
550
- (2007/8) 86,687
- (2008/9) 92,220
- (2009/10) 96,348
X40
- (2007/8) 101,260
- (2008/9) 117,830
- (2009/10) 102,980
704
- (2007/8) 76,712
- (2008/9) 81,997
- (2009/10) 93,261
X32
- (2007/8) 76,140
- (2008/9) 78,773
- (2009/10) 70,469
X94
- (2007/8) 80,016
- (2008/9) 86,369
- (2009/10) 79,223
If you can make tables on this fourm, please tell me how and I'll try to make the above look nicer.
Oh, and if anyone has a link to more recent usage figures, that would be useful too.
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