Falmouth is a very busy route that has to run efficiently because of the way the services pass at Penryn. Any long distance services coming in would cause a lot of problems if they were late I’d have thought.
Agreed - you'd have to put a lot of contingency in the timetable to deal with one long distance service to Falmouth, given the single track etc, meaning that you may have to cancel at least a couple of regular trains for the sake of it - doesn't seem worth bothering about.
The Cornish branches seem a great example of what works and what doesn't. We've seen huge increases on simple self contained clock face branch lines like Falmouth, where passengers can rely on the services. We've seen issues on the Newquay branch (passenger numbers still lower than the total from five years ago, after a drop of around 10% before a correction), where the branch is dependent upon long distance traffic at the expense of locals (even running fewer services to local stations during the summer period to accommodate the long distance trains, meaning locals have a gap of over four hours during the summer because they aren't as important as a Paddington service that doesn't serve intermediate stations on the branch).
In fact the Newquay branch looks like a relic from the 1960s - it's a simple branch twenty miles from the main line (Par) - even a 230 should be able to rattle up and down it every hour. But it takes fifty minutes for a Sprinter to do Newquay - Par! Barring services of under five miles (where one minute of "recovery" time can artificially reduce the average speed), this must be the slowest route in the UK!
Okay, that's pretty terrible, but at least we can use the branch for a simple bi-hourly service with one unit, right? Well, no, as well as the long gaps mentioned above, the first service of the day at Newquay is the 10:09 arrival, the first departure at 10:13. Half of the arrivals and half of the departures during the week are after 17:00. That may be great if you want to come on holiday but seems of little actual use for anyone using the branch for everyday travel.
The only service to local stations on Summer Saturdays is a return that leaves Par at 19:48 and Newquay at 20:45. No service seems to be the same between the "weekday"/ "Saturday" and "Sunday" timetables (even allowing for summer/winter variations), which seems deliberately customer-unfriendly.
Falmouth etc have shown that branches work best when they focus on simple everyday travel, regular passengers making necessary journeys.
Instead of more through services to Cornwall, I'd prefer keeping each branch line focussed on everyday passengers, clock face connections on the main line for long distance passengers (with the proposal for two trains an hour from Plymouth to Penzance, connections to branches should be reasonable enough).
Instead of thinking of St. Ives, Falmouth and Looe as "
demoted to nothing more than branch lines", they look to be places with a practical railway service of use all year round, rather than the weird branch that is Newquay, where you might as well close all intermediate stations because they seem too inconvenient to serve properly and nothing seems to happen before ten in the morning (unlike the local bus services - First Kernow must be delighted in FGW!).
(the same applies to re-openings, where a short simple stub like Ebbq Vale works perfectly well without needing exotic services to places hundreds of miles away or anything particularly complicated with the timetable)
That said, some people on here will undoubtably prefer Newquay (quirky timetable... a handful of long distance services to far flung destinations... named trains... no two "days" with the same service) because that's more interesting to them than functional/ practical services. Fair enough.
