Agreed. Indeed for the cash needed to reinstate two miles of the line you could instead put it in the bank, and use the interest you'd get to pay for an hourly luxury coach service Aber - Lampeter - Camarthen with fares free.
Just don't send it via Pencader if you're going via Lampeter, the journey time needs to be reasonbly quick. Rather than free fares, make it available on railway journey planners (like the Minehead bus) for just £1 on top of your rail fare for the whole trip or 50p if you're only going to Lampeter from Aberystwyth or Carmarthen. And make sure the operator takes the word 'luxury' seriously and provides a vehicle with decent legroom etc. not a fairly standard bus with very little legroom as most of the TrawsCymru vehicles are.
A regular service on the SDL sounds great especially if paths can be found for it between Bridgend & Cardiff. Certainly a station at Llandarcy and one at Morriston would be ideal especially as park & ride hubs. railfuture did do a report on the sdl a few years ago.
I think having more than one station on the SDL would defeat the object of speeding up Carmarthen-Cardiff journeys. The only way you could have more stops is if you put in a new Swansea Docks station (with a tram from there to High Street station and Quadrant bus station) with a circular service between Swansea Docks and High Street stations via the SDL. That would serve all SDL stops, the Cardiff-Carmarthen only Morriston Parkway.
has to be done with recast of services west of High Street towards Carmarthen and beyond (to maintain or improve connections)
Not sure how much "white space" is available on the SWML beyond the splendidly named Briton Ferry Up Flying Loop junction , but we are talking or hourly peak . maybe 2 hourly off peak .....
My thinking has long been that the recast would be as follows:
- Swansea - Carmarthen all-stops hourly, extending to Pembroke Dock every 2hrs (with talk of a St. Clears station, maybe revise this to hourly as far as Whitland)
- Swansea - Clarbeston Road hourly calling at Gowerton, Llanelli, Pembrey & Burry Port, Carmarthen, Whitland and Clunderwen
- Cardiff - Camarthen hourly calling at Port Talbot Parkway, Morriston Swansea Valley Parkway and Llanelli only
In general, services 2 and 3 would continue every 2 hours to Milford Haven (the Cardiff service calling at Whitland then non-stop to Haverfordwest), providing approximately hourly service. In the other hours, service 2 would run to Fishguard BUT:
- both ferry services at Fishguard should be met, in both directions, with a fast service from Cardiff
- the morning services from Fishguard should remain at 10-to the even hours and the evening services at 10-to the odd hours
These two will require some shuffling of services 2 and 3 between Milford and Fishguard, with a 3hr gap in the Fishguard timetable at some point. The express being hourly means Carmarthen and Haverfordwest retain their present level of through trains to and from Cardiff. In summer, depending on availability of rolling stock, the express Cardiff service could run to Pembroke Dock as the new Pembroke Coast Express when GWR withdraws.
I'll tenously link it with the Carmartehn to Aberystwyth reopening discussion. Providing a service along the SDL will benefit far people than spending a lot more money on reinstating the railway through the rural swathes of Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire.
It isn't that much of a departure from the topic since the TrawsLinkCymru campaign did at one point include their Aberystwyth services running through to Cardiff over the SDL. And another benifit of my proposed hourly SDL service to Carmarthen is that there would be a service terminating there in some hours which could go to Aberystwyth if we ever get that far down the To-Do list (there's just alot of other new lines I'd rather the money was spent on first before getting to Carmarthen-Aberystwyth, one possibly being a new fast link between Cardiff and Bridgend so that fasts don't get stuck behind the metro stoppers to Maesteg).
Indeed so,Trawslink use a methodology as a geographer I don't recognise . They claim the lines catchment is 260K. Given that Ceredigions entire population is 70K they must be including the populations of adjoining counties. Usin this methodology I've concluded that reopening Gobowen to Buttington Junction and Moat Lane Junction to Nerthyr Tydfil will have a far better business case!
Assuming Buttington Junction is Welshpool I think that project would be more transformational on a Welsh national connectivity level than Aberystwyth-Carmarthen (coupled with a Bangor-Porthmadog link) although the original route of Moat Lane to Merthyr was far too twisty and indirect to make sense today. It'd be a Y-shaped network, like HS2.
