Merseyrail have announced record pre-tax profits for last year, of £9m. (source) & (source)
The figure that caught my eye was that they invested a whopping £800,000 of that in improvements over the period. That’s a lot of yellow and black paint!
But then, I thought, I wonder how many passengers use the network, and how much does that turn out to be (roughly speaking) per passenger, over the year?
First of all we need to work out how many trips (approximately) are made over the network on a yearly basis … (source – Merseyside Route Utilisation Strategy, March 2009 – PDF 3MB )
(I’m only including ‘local’ traffic here, the actual passenger figures are higher)
|
Wirral Line Annual trips to and from central Liverpool (million)
|
|
| New Brighton – Liverpool |
0.8
|
| West Kirby – Liverpool |
2.5
|
| Chester – Liverpool |
2.8
|
| Ellesmere Port – Liverpool |
0.1
|
|
Total
|
6.2 million trips
|
|
City Line route into Liverpool Annual trips to and from central Liverpool (million)
|
|
| Wigan – Liverpool |
0.8
|
| Newton-le-Willows/Warr’n Bank Quay – L’pool |
1.8
|
| Warrington C/Runcorn – Liverpool |
0.8
|
|
Total
|
3.4 million trips
|
|
Annual trips to and from central Liverpool (million)
|
|
| Southport – Liverpool |
4.2
|
| Ormskirk – Liverpool |
3.7
|
| Kirkby – Liverpool |
2.1
|
| Hunts Cross – Liverpool |
2.3
|
|
Total
|
12.3 million trips
|
I make that just over 21.9 million trips. Let’s call it 20m to keep it simple.
Assuming that the majority are ‘returns’, that’s 10m people that made a journey to/from work, shopping, court etc etc ….
So they sold (at a very conservative estimate) 10 million return tickets in the period, and invested £800,000 in ‘improvements’. That doesn’t sound quite so good now,does it? 8p each, it works out at.
Still, almost anything that doesn’t run away is yellow and black nowadays, so at least we can see where it went. They could have tried spending some of it on platform 2 at James Street station mind you, which at the moment is a total disgrace.
