"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
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I remember trundling along the line from reading to Canterbury once, many
many years ago. There were 3-4 people on it all the way on and off. I went
back via London. Much faster.

That was just after Beeching.

I doubt it gets any more traffic today. It simply doesnt connect people
and their work.

Are there still any services that run end-to-end Reading to Canterbury? I
would imagine that there is a fairly healthy Reading to Gatwick usage, with
separate Redhill to Canterbury (or Redhill to Tonbridge) service that has
lower usage. And does it matter if few people made the end-to-end journey,
if more people travelled between various intermediate stations? I would
imagine there are lots of lines where few people travel from A to Z, but
many travel from A to F, C to H, D to Z etc (where stations are in
alphabetical order).

When I used to travel from Bracknell to Gatwick (to fly to/from my sister
who lived in Boston at the time) it was a toss-up between Bracknell to
Wokingham, wait almost half an hour (*), then Wokingham to Gatwick, versus
Bracknell to Clapham Junction and then Clapham Junction to Gatwick, with a
shorter delay but the need to get my suitcases further between platforms.



(*) Services on the Reading-Waterloo and Reading-Gatwick lines at Wokingham
are timetabled badly for anyone wanting to make a Bracknell to
Guildford/Gatwick connection because, in order to minimise the time and the
number of occasions that the level crossing barriers are down, the
Reading-Gatwick service leaves a few seconds before the Waterloo-Reading
train arrives, and vice versa when going in the opposite direction. Or at
least, that's how they timetabled it when I last used that service in the
late 90s. Occasionally I managed the footbridge sprint if one train was
running early and the other was running late, but more often we'd sit
outside Wokingham, on the opposite side to the station, waiting until the
train in the station was ready to leave, so that one closing of the barriers
satisfied two trains moving in opposite directions simultaneously. Very
frustrating to think "We arrived early enough that I could have caught the
other train but we were stranded on the wrong side of the crossing even
though the other train was running late."