Passenger Bookings or Passenger Journeys

When quoting numbers, do all railways quote Passenger Bookings - ie the number of paying visitors - or do some still resort to flattering their figures by quoting Passenger Journeys (where a return ticket counts as 2), which I think dates back to the days of the Railway Clearing House reconciling journeys and apportioning receipts between different companies.

 

The annual return to the ORR requires both passengers carried and passenger journeys to be given. For heritage railways the latter can become quite complex when such as day rovers are taken into account. For instance, how do you count someone who gets off at every station and catches a following train? For this reason, I think that they essentially disregard it in their statistical information.

 

I was really thinking of it as a comparator for real paying passengers carried as opposed to Members Tickets etc

 

Members tickets should be counted in the statistics. The fact that they are travelling at a privileged rate (even free) is irrelevant.

 

The annual return for the ORR is data collected on their behalf by the HRA.
Railways disclose the number of visitors, the number of passenger journeys, the train miles and the passenger miles.
It is usual to make certain assumptions, some of which inflate the passenger mileage figure and some depress it. Provided the compiler at each railway is happy they even out there is no problem.

 

Some railways allow the use of a Volunteers Grade Card as a free pass without any ticket being issued. Others insist on issuing a ticket for every journey - no matter how free and how short. I travel at least once a month on the SVR using my Shareholder's Pass - I am not counted in the passenger figures.

Makes the use of these numbers as a comparative purposes pretty pointless.

 

Which makes the quotation of the late Lord Stamp (LMS Chairman 1926 - 1941?) pertinent: "The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the chowky dar (village watchman in India), who just puts down what he damn pleases."

 

True - but no doubt in the next few weeks, we will see the railway press trumpeting "Record Figures" or "XX Railway tops the league" - based on these dubious statistics.

 

Yes - and if it is Steam Railway that announces the news, the answer will be the GCR regardless of the real figures; and if it is Heritage Railways, someone who may or may not be Robin Jones will ask us to visit Facebook to find out the answer, and will then write an explanatory article in the magazine extensively quoting this thread...

Tom :behindsofa:

 

Like it

 

The only thing which matters is the colour of the ink on the bottom line of the accounts. Traffic figures as such are meaningless and, at worst, little more than, putting it vulgarly, willy waving!

Paul H.