No track and would cut straight across the heritage centre and need a remodel of the station, but other than that, no problem!
No track and would cut straight across the heritage centre and need a remodel of the station, but other than that, no problem!
A south-west chord IS being looked at in the context of providing connectivity between the WoE line and HoW line, but it's very much a theory at the moment.
It is cheaper than a bus operator ticket here in Bournemouth. A quarter PlusBus ticket in my region across all operators costs £140 and a morebus 90-day zone A ticket costs £145.
I think you have oversimplified the problem. Part of the issue is also the bus stop is closer to his house than Bournemouth station and Poole bus station is closer to the swimming pool than Poole railway station!
This was 15 years ago now but I used to commute from New Milton - Bournemouth and the service was perfectly adequate. There was also a healthy number of others who used to commute to Bournemouth from the east.
Did you not research the transport provision before moving?
New Milton is outside BCP. It's even not part of South West England. Does anyone here use SWR trains to commute within BCP and think the service is good?
New Milton has the same service as Christchurch which is one of the places you were complaining about. Be as pedantic as you like about the local authorities, as though that makes any difference whatsoever, but if the service from New Milton was acceptable for commuting then the service from Christchurch also was.
Not the case in Bournemouth here. The region is huge, equivalent to morebus zones AB already. Zone A covers the area governed by the BCP council and zone B is already outside BCP proper, covering Wimborne and Ferndown.
I don't think there was ever an east to south chord, which is presumably what Richard Drax MP wants. There isn't much in the way of one, but the curvature might be interesting! And it would miss Yeovil Junction altogether.
That's not so, and this belief is a fiction. We live in a pretty large city, are not "rich", and drive to far more places than we use rail to. Knowing far more about the rail system than the average, I do use rail when more convenient. However, that's not for a lot of journeys. Bournemouth/Poole is a pretty large urban area, so living there should give a good clue.
Or is Drax talking about a possible service to Weymouth over the GWR route from Paddington, via Castle Cary? The best times by that route seem to be 2h57, (e.g the 1604 departure) exactly the same journey time as the direct trains from Waterloo. As the connection time at Castle Cary is more than 30 minutes, a direct Padd/Weymouth service should be able to beat that.
Another point that's worthy of note here is that, despite their spacing being perhaps less than optimal for this kind of journey, there were at least three trains per hour for most of the day between Bournemouth and Poole before the pandemic. This makes it slightly more likely that there would be a train at a close enough to the time to when someone considering the train would want to arrive or depart. It also means that if plans change or disruption occurs there's more likely to be an alternative service.
You will have to define what you think is good, are you looking for some sort of Metro service pattern?
I never knew anyone commuting between Bournemouth and Poole on the train, being from the area, partly because Bournemouth station is not centrally located and partly because for Bournemouth, Branksome, Parkstone, and Poole, there has always been a frequent bus service with a journey time hardly much longer than the train (end to end around 25 minutes off-peak). The old 101-105 group of services (nowadays m1/m2) had long offered a bus between Bournemouth Square and Poole Bus Station at least every 5 minutes, all serving Branksome en route and 8 per hour serving Lower Parkstone. This is not even counting any later Yellowbuses additions.
I always felt that was one line they should have kept open as a route north but I'm no expert and it probably shows.
A coach link between Bournemouth and Salisbury would probably be worth subsidising as part of a long-distance rail provision. It could probably be scheduled in an hour with one stop at Ringwood, which would bring that area into the national network as it currently is very remote from it. One service per hour would probably be able to connect with trains in the Warminster direction at Salisbury. The coach, unlike a train, could also serve the centre of Bournemouth as well as Bournemouth station.
X3 is one hour 30 minutes between Salisbury and Bournemouth - could a direct coach really bring that under an hour?
Why would he mention “linking up to the Salisbury route”, if he was aiming at Castle Cary?
Given that the majority of the existing train services offer a time of just less than 90 minutes with one change I think that going down to 60 minutes would have a very clear impact, yes.
The scheduled running time of X3 is 85 minutes in the morning, 80 minutes in the afternoon, and 65 minutes for the final departure running the whole length. Therefore 60 minutes is realistic in late night if we take out Boscombe and the hospital from the route, but unlikely in daytime.
I believe he is talking about the south chord into the GWR goods station at Yeovil Junction which was built when the rest of the line was built but never had track laid on it.
