Spot on. What is a bit frustrating is the fact that the existing GWR Bristol-Malvern can’t use the station as it would have been a useful place to change for Gloucester/Cheltenham - Oxford. But you can’t change the history of railway building.
Did you read my previous post pointing out that from Gloucester anyone going to Oxford will be far better off going via Didcot, unless they aren't in any great hurry - in addition, their chances of getting a seat on an hourly GWR IET service going to Didcot from December will be much better than trying to get on an XC two-car Class 170 to or from Worcestershire Parkway. And they won't have to pay the no doubt very reasonable fare set by XC (
sarcasm alert). The GWR Bristol-Malvern services only run every couple of hours and are of precious little use for any purpose as a result.
I wouldn't be so sure about that time limit for commuters. There are plenty of people who commute over that time into London, and certainly when we lived in Worcester some years ago there were people doing it.
I didn't say no one was a regular London commuter from Worcester, but the fact remains that any regular commute for several days a week with a journey time of 90 minutes or more each way - so commuting to London from Moreton-in-Marsh and anywhere further west in Cotswold Line terms - is regarded as extreme commuting and statistically very few people do it. No wonder, given the amount of time all that travelling takes out of someone's life.
To serve the rural area of Worcestershire I’d assume. Giving the villages and small towns somewhere with adequate parking spaces and services to large cities that have congestion issues.
It will have direct services to Birmingham, Gloucester, Oxford, Cardiff, Derby, Nottingham, London, Worcester and limited services to Hereford. Then to the large towns of Cheltenham and Reading. I doubt it was built to serve Worcester - more likely trying to cater for longer distance journeys, or to Birmingham or Cheltenham commuters.
Really some sort of peak GWR service should start and terminate from the station, to Gloucester (maybe even Bristol) also stopping at Ashchurch which gets a dire service.
The planned services seem quite infrequent so I hope they are aiming to entice long distance passengers, at least to start with, otherwise, what’s the point??
This is an interesting topic, and an interesting station opening!
The Parkway station has always been intended to serve the city of Worcester, as well as the surrounding area, and to offer long-distance connectivity for Worcestershire as a whole. It is located close to the southern and eastern bypass roads, which will make it accessible from much of Worcester with far less aggro than getting to Shrub Hill, which is where passenger for London who want to leave their car at a station for the day go at present And at one fell swoop Parkway will provide more car park spaces than all those available at the county's other railway stations added together.
I repeat, it was not built for Birmingham commuters, who are already pretty well provided for - and hardly anyone bothers trying to commute by rail to Cheltenham, because there are no GWR morning peak trains in either direction between about 07.00 and 09.00 and to get from Cheltenham Spa station to just about anywhere anyone actually wants to go in the town requires a bus or car ride, so the M5 wins hands down as a travel option.
An hourly Worcester-Cheltenham-Gloucester-Briatol service would make a difference, but until the Government changes the service level commitment to require that frequency - and GWR has enough dmus to provide it - that is not going to happen any time soon.
Worcester is pretty much ground zero for why Britain will be better off without FirstGroup in the bus industry. Having a council that would rather build a massively over-architected mess of a station in a field somewhere than fund a proper service doesn't help, but even going back to the BadgerBus days First have tried nothing in Worcester and are all out of ideas.
A nonsense argument - the money to pay for building the station is a combination of designated government grants and loans taken out by the county council, which will be repaid from the car park income.
A whole different kettle of fish from subsidising bus services - which most shire county councils have precious little money left to do as a result of years of cuts in their funding from the government - or none at all in the case of Oxfordshire, which axed all bus subsidies several years ago.