Brigg railway line supporter and campaigner, Paul Johnson, has kindly supplied passenger use numbers for our station on Saturday, July 29:
0926 train into Brigg: 11 passengers got on (see picture above), 6 got off, including a family of 3 on a single ticket from Gainsborough Central to Brigg.
1147: 2 on 4 off
1330: 4 on 0 off
1553: 1 on 10 off.
■ No data is available for the 1730 and 1908 trains.
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, many families from Brigg would arrive at the town's station early on Saturday mornings in July and August to board a train for Cleethorpes to enjoy the sea, sand and amusements.
This is still happening today but on a much smaller scale as passenger trains only run on Saturdays and not seven days a week as they did until the early 1990s.
Other passengers from Brigg currently use the Saturday service to get to Barnetby where they can change trains for other destinations.
However, this is not without problems.
We have already revealed how on Saturday, July 22 the Brigg connecting train to Lincoln was full by the time it reached Barnetby, resulting in the train company having to offer a taxi ride to those left stranded on the village station.
On July 29, people who travelled from Brigg were able to get on the Lincoln- bound train at Barnetby but had to stand all the way to the county capital, as all seats were taken.
Further folk got on at Market Rasen and also had to stand in the gangway.
So why does East Midlands Trains keep sending a single-car unit on this popular mid-morning service to Lincoln via Barnetby, instead of a two-carriage unit?
They offer an attractive fare on Saturdays - Brigg to Lincoln and back for just a tenner, which is a bargain buy.
So you can't really grumble about a bit of standing about.
But perhaps rail bosses will consider putting two-car units on all trains during the warmer months of the year when there's peak demand for seats.
We can but ask.
■ The mid-afternoon train back to Barnetby from Lincoln last Saturday had two carriages.
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| Cleethorpes railway station on a hot August day with the seafront just a few yards away to the right. This has long been a popular venue for people from Brigg to enjoy a day of fun in the sun. |
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4 comments:
the [clee] grimsby - newark train has a record of being full on satudays for years call for a second carriage have fallen on deaf ears as the mon - fri service is often empty,but during school hols the carriage is full.my proposal of extending the service to cleethopes all times with a request stop only at all stations not being serviced by this train to increase choice for passengers should warrant a second carriage maybe even a third.
The trouble really kicked off around fifteen years ago when Central Trains re-allocated resources to the Birmingham area when the previously used two and three car trains were replaced by the single car class 153 type. Strange, I thought at the time, when the train in question often left Grimsby Town with two cars carrying a standing load on Saturdays and in the summer months. Currently the 09.20 from Grimsby is actually supposed to be a two car train, and often is, but during the summer the additional unit is switched to the Nottingham-Skegness service so an established year round traffic is overlooked for a seasonal peak flow elsewhere. Now I regularly visit family in Sleaford and, these days, prefer to drive on account of both the above situation and the poor connections at Lincoln which says something when it is considered that as a retired railwayman with access to extremely inexpensive rail travel I would turn my back on the most desirable means of getting around in some cases. In general the train services in Lincolnshire are so poor that, as the Humber Bridge close to my home, Brough is often a preferable starting point to many of the remaining rail journeys that I make, taking just a little more time to drive there as it does to walk to my local station and cutting out a load of messing about with poor connections at Doncaster and an extremely low speed journey over much of the route in that direction.
A clarification, when I mentioned the two car 09.20 Grimsby-Lincoln train I was referring to Saturdays, Monday-Fridays a single unit is used.
Brilliant clarification, this proves that under the new EMT franchise we need a minimum of a 2 car set on every service
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