And it's in Worcester, not... not in Worcester.
...although in terms of parking capacity it's not all that much better than WOF
Which is silly, with the amount of no-longer-used sidings land behind it. (And for which access from most directions does not involve the Newtown Road bridge.)
The former is good because although it's crap, it's a lot less crap than having nothing at all which is what we've got at the moment). It's also a first step on the way to becoming more less crap.
The latter is bad because it's any or all of: a partial or complete replacement of well-used existing facilities; a new obstacle to performing improvements the existing facilities need, or even an excuse to let them become even worse; completely useless to anyone who doesn't have a car; encouragement to people who do have cars but nevertheless are still prepared to travel by train to drive for longer distances before they get on the train; a way of spending a large amount of money which is chosen in preference to more useful ways to spend it on the grounds that it lends itself better to lots of posters and glossy brochures and grinning idiots in suits getting their photo in the local paper than, for example, upgrading the trackwork or recasting timetabling/routing with greater thoughtfulness and consideration; daft; and then all the reasons most newly built things end up being crap whether they're anything to do with railways or not.
And indeed it jolly well shouldn't be, for reasons such as:
- The revenue would not be lost. It simply would not be gained. Accountants may be mentally crippled with the ingrained delusion that zero is an arbitrarily large negative number, but there's no reason why normal people should be.
- A station car park isn't for providing revenue. It's for people going by train to leave their cars in.
- There is no need to increase the ticket price to restore total revenue to some arbitrary figure in the absence of some other item in the total. (Indeed if you start down that road you end up getting stuck where you can't do anything because everything's too expensive.)
Allow grinning idiots from the council to get their photos in the local paper (see above).
I would most definitely prefer that. After all, I don't live in Stoulton. I can walk to Shrub Hill. It doesn't count as serving Worcester if I have to get a train out of Worcester first, and if I'm going to have to change trains in any case it can just as well be done at New Street or Cheltenham/Gloucester, I don't need a new station to do it at.
Trouble is the chance of this sort of thing ever happening is now less than it's ever been, which is one of the main things I have against WOP. The Midland used to do it as a regular thing; shame we haven't still got them.
Or indeed would want to. It annoys me that the Network Rail journey search engine defaults to considering daft numbers of changes acceptable just to save a few minutes, and the "minimise changes" option gives silly answers as often as not (so you have to check all its answers anyway just to see whether they're silly or not). Given the choice between changing trains and a direct but slightly slower service, I will nearly always take the option of remaining comfortably seated in the warm and avoiding hassle in preference to heaving myself out into the cold again and spending n minutes staring at stationary concrete while I wait for a train which might turn out to be rammed. I plan journeys on criteria more complex and numerous than the bald "absolute minimum journey time" the NR site uses, so I don't want the site to "be helpful", nor to "stop being helpful and be unhelpful instead", I just want it to show me everything and let me make my own mind up.
It's not as inappropriate as all that, really. Bristol Parkway was named after a road; "Parkway" means "Road"; so there you go. Literally, in the case of Bodmin; generally, in that "$location Parkway" and "$location Road" are simply different eras' names for the concept of a station that dumps you out of the train in the middle of bleeding nowhere and leaves you thinking "well wtf am I supposed to do now then?" (to which the answer is "spend 2 hours walking and then have another think").
