Bristol Temple Meads has become our most improved railway station, according to a survey, following substantial upgrades to the Bristol area.
Bristol Temple Meads achieved a passenger satisfaction score of 83%, up 12 percentage points from last year – the biggest improvement of any station in the country directly managed by Network Rail.
The survey, carried out each autumn and spring by watchdog Transport Focus, asked about 30,000 passengers across the country for their views on the railway.
Overall passenger satisfaction on our Western route – on which Bristol Temple Meads sits – has improved by seven percentage points since last year. That has made Western one of the top scoring routes in the country with a passenger satisfaction score of 86%.
Reading remains the top scoring station for passenger satisfaction on the route, with a score of 92% – seven points above the national average.
Britain’s biggest ever signalling upgrade – five things we’ve delivered for Bristol
Providing better services for Bristol
The increased passenger satisfaction at Temple Meads follows a string of significant upgrades to the railway in the Bristol area – part of the biggest investment in the Great Western railway since engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel built it more than 150 years ago.
In January, the first electric trains began running between Cardiff Central and Paddington, extending electric services to Wales. This means passengers travelling from the Bristol area now benefit from more services, more seats and greener and quieter journeys all the way to Cardiff.
It also means an average journey time saving of 14 minutes between South Wales and London and an extra 15,000 weekday seats between the two capital cities.
In December 2018, we opened two new sets of ticket gates at Temple Meads to make it easier for passengers to get on and off the station and reduce congestion during peak travel times.
In total, on platform three, we installed eight additional ticket gates at the new Bonapartes entrance and six at Queen Anne Gate. Both locations include two wide aisle ticket gates to improve accessibility.
We’ve also delivered important upgrades for passengers nearby at Bristol Parkway station. In spring 2018, we officially opened a new platform at Bristol Parkway for a more frequent train service on a more resilient network. Improvements to the track layout at Bristol Parkway are also helping freight companies.
Over the past six-years, we have worked to upgrade the signalling system in the Bristol area, disconnecting and removing old equipment from the 1960s and 1970s.
Meanwhile, the railway stations we directly manage across the Western route – Temple Meads, London Paddington and Reading – all provide free drinking water fountains for passengers. We launched this scheme in February last year and have saved more than 100,000 plastic bottles from ending up as landfill at Bristol Temple Meads alone.