lrailadventure
Member
Gloucester is a nowhere place and a nothing economy next to Cheltenham’s. The current situation is correct and if anything, the London should go direct.
If you stop the London train from calling at Gloucester, it will impact a lot more people than I think you realise. That train is used because of its convenient connection times at Cheltenham onto the longer distance XC services. A lot of people also use the service to travel to Swindon and beyond.
For connections at Cheltenham towards Glos, passengers would have to wait for the very unreliable XC Nots to Cardiff service, or the infrequent TfW Welsh service. The current situation, although not ideal, works.
For travel towards Swindon and onward to London, what would you propose? Because passengers wouldn't want to get a train into Cheltenham (same issues as above, unreliable and infrequent) and then change onto that service. There isn't a station south of Glos that works as an interchange either, and travelling all the way to Bristol to change onto a Swindon service is just plain daft.
XC could cut out Cheltenham and call at Waterwells and Worcestershire Parkway instead.
Worcestershire Parkway would be an instant no go. Too far away from everything, only used to serve a motorway for commuter travel into Worcester and Birmingham.
Waterwells is too far from Cheltenham too for it to be considered reasonable to cut out the stop and expect people to drive there. You'd have the opposite effect with your plans and instead of encouraging more people to ditch their cars and use public transport, use their cars for the full journey..
Cheltenham is a well used station, and it is right that XC have their services calling there, it's just a nuisance for everyone who doesn't live in Cheltenham that the service only calls there. Having one XC train that calls at Cheltenham and Waterwells (e.g. the Man Pic to Bristol) and some of the GWR stoppers (perhaps the Bristol to Worcester and Cheltenham to Swindon/London services) also adding Waterwells to their calling pattern would be the best solution in my opinion since they're just about far enough apart and the demand could be argued since it would cater for commuter and leisure travellers, but expecting XC to cut out Cheltenham and exclusively serve Waterwells is quite an odd proposition.