When connecting passengers look profitable until you count the wait

Through fares are a blessing in a sales report. They are a nuisance in an operations file if the only join key is a surname and a date. We have seen ‘connections’ with dwells of four hours in a town with no waiting room, counted as network glue in a franchise conversation.

A Connecting Traffic Assessment starts by asking whether the two extracts share a ticket identity. If they do not, we can still compare timed arrivals and departures and say how many passengers could have connected. That is a ceiling, not a count of people who did.

Where a true itinerary key exists, we band dwells: tight (risky), usable, and idle. Idle connections often belong to people who treated the hub as a destination — shopping, a hospital, a relative — and bought a through ticket because it was cheaper than two singles. Those passengers are real. They do not justify a five-minute diagrammed change.

Bring both files, the public timetable for the same weeks, and anyone who knows how missed connections are rebooked. Without the rebook log, a miss looks like a successful through journey that simply arrived late.