Thank you for posting, those are indeed amazing figures.

Were it possible, it would be interesting to know:
a) The type of travel e.g. work commute, school commute, business, tourist, leisure
b) Whether a long or short distance journey

With Okehampton, I think that indeed that the Interchange is likely to take a lot of the park & ride and bus-sourced traffic. For a lot of people in places like Bude, the preference is to drive into Exeter if they are going on a longer journey such as London. I suspect that direct 80x trains from Okehampton through to London in the morning and evening would bring a lot of new users. 

It will also be interesting to see what the figures for Portishead and Pill end up being. The business case reckoned 958,980 passenger trips per year for the two in the opening year based on an hourly service (https://metrowestphase1.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/8.4-outline-business-case-2017-part-2-of-3.pdf)

 
How does that loading example, and the "25% seats occupied", work? 17 arrivals and 17 departures per day at Barnstaple [TLC; BNP] ...

https://www.railwaydata.co.uk/loadings/gbr/?TLC=BNP - showing (in the capture below) up to 135 people on a train off Barnstaple and by the time you add intermediate stations to Exeter it may be full and standing.    But yet - six services, 288 out of 6 x 200 seats occupied = 24%

Flows to and from Barnstaple are very "peaky" and very much commuting in one direction - and that's typical of so many places.  Coping with more flows the dominant direction in the peaks is very expensive - extra carriages needed for just two journeys a day.  Much better to sell and promote "shoulder" service and counter-flow travel; the trains are there anyway and the empty seats may as well be used to generate *some* income.

 

All the statistics are journeys rather than arrivals.   600,000 journeys = 300,000 arrivals + 300,000 departures

 
No. 50.  See figures for BNP at https://www.railwaydata.co.uk/stations/overview/?TLC=BNP .

 
They are smashing stats,I was looking at just one station,Barnstaple.

It states 600,000 arrivals.

There are 17 arrivals at Barnstaple which means that if every train was full and standing on arrival
 the MAXIMUM amount of passengers arriving at Barnstaple with
17 trains each day 365 days equates to 1,241,000 million passengers per year
So to sum up does every train at arriving at Barnstaple have approx 100 passengers on it?

 
Okehampton in 2005 was virtually nil. Did Falmouth have a half hour service then; Paignton did, but only in the rush hour.
If the railway increases a service passengers do come in most circumstances.

In London the Victoria Line was built despite a declining London population. The decline turned round in the 1980s and the line is at capacity.

 
A surprise is the number achieved by Okehampton. (Also, always tickled that St Ives eclipses Penzance, though that's for... reasons.)

Mark

 
The "Devon Metro" (doesn't exist) figures illustrates the continuing growth of Exeter in terms of job creation and which has created a commuter railway.
Paignton is a perfect example; thousands of houses being built on the ring road from White Rock to Kings Ash Hill that require a bus to Paignton station or being dropped off.

The Kingskerswell-by-pass campaigned for 40 years was meant to bring jobs to Torbay but had the reverse effect in allowing commuting to Exeter which luckily for the railway is not car friendly. Exeter (138,000) will overtake Torbay (140,000) in population size.

I expect when Okehampton Interchange opens there will be a significant drop in passengers from Okehampton who transfer to the new station. Barnstaple really needs a half hour service and Exmouth a 20 minute service but needs new track infrastructure.

 

I agree with you.  So how do we do the right thing now?

Some Population comparisons:
Minehead - 12,000
St Ives, Cornwall - 12,000
Barnstaple - 31,000
Okehampton - 10,000
Looe - 5,500
Swanage - 10,000
Bude - 10,000
Newquay - 24,000
Portishead - 26,000
Exmouth - 36,000
Penzance - 21,000

 
50 Years ago, I had left my signalman's job on the Big Railway and was working hard so that Minehead would be on this chart.  It still hurts that things didn't work out that way, even though (thank goodness) the permanent way is still there, in use, and in much better shape than it was in 1976

I remain convinced that we were doing the right thing.  These numbers suggest that it could have become a great success in real transport

 
An interesting exercise to see how passenger numbers to GWR termini have grown from 2005 (blue) to2025 (red).  Some branch lines have significant intermediate traffic, in one or two cases dwarfing the terminus.  Others have very limited intermediate traffic.  So the growth may be the thing to compare and not the absolute numbers