Port Talbot Parkway less used than valley railway stations

Rail Wales, the magazine of Railfuture in Wales, has published a list of the twenty most used rail stations in Wales. Neath is ninth, with 837,000 passenger entries and exits in 2015/16 (up by a percentage point on previous years). Twentieth is Treherbert, with 510,000 movements. Port Talbot Parkway does not appear, as it did not in the 2013/14 figures. Port Talbot could be underestimated because of a failure to record arrivals out-of-hours, but the same is true of Neath.

If the ranking is genuine, then one wonders why so much money has been spent on a futuristic new Port Talbot station building when a few relatively simple, but necessary, upgrades would have sufficed. Meantime, Neath has languished with nothing to show for the thousands which the council spent on a study.