Great Western Coffee Shop

Really? ... that's news to me!  Can you provide data to back up that statement?  I would be most interested to learn more.

No actual data other than Westbury drivers telling me that they stopped and picked up various manager types at Melksham each day. You don't need to have too many managers living at a location in order for a franchise to lay on a train service it seems.

So. Mess room gossip then? And none of these managers stayed with the franchise when First took over?

I find it hard to believe that a service pattern was decided upon based on where managers lived.

Incredulous.

Up to you. Just telling it as it is. Or was under Wessex Trains.

Are you suggesting the Westbury drivers made it up?

Certainly used to happen under Bob Reid....

Which one?

Sir Bob....trains used to stop for him

e.g?

I looked up Robert (Bob) Reid on Google as he was around at a time I lived far from any station ... surely it wouldn't relate to Melksham ... and learned about his concerns as the Chairman of British Rail in the lead up to privarisation.   I read in The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/reid-takes-on-ministers-over-rail-privatisation-1481880.html), 31st January 1993:


I can't imagine what he was thinking. He couldn't have been imagining that a train operator would be allowed to leave a gap from - say - 07:20 to 19:48 where there had previously been services at  05:52, 07:45, 13:35, 17:02 and 21:33, surely?

Not the same managers same time every day though. Surely there are limits to how many days you'd stay overnight in Melksham, much less make a career out of it...?
 

So a driver would see Bob on the platform and slam on the breaks? ;D

Watch out though, there were two of them.  In this case you have the right one though as he was Sir Bob.

I seem to remember in Wessex days, of a manager that lived at Newton St Cyres on the Barnstaple branch. It may be my failing memory, but I'm sure a lot more trains stopped there then, than they do now!

I've been taking a further look at this ... talking with a few people.

To this day, where a senior manager lives on a particular line / uses a particular train, there remains a tendency for little issues to get fixed far quicker than might be the case otherwise.   When you think of it, that's natural; Colin, let's call him, notices that the bins are overflowing at Fireplace station when he gets on the train there and drops a quick email to the right department.   And Colin's also going to be quick to notice (and at the early planning stage) when a planned change of a train time by a couple of minutes removes a guaranteed connection and will let folks within know - for the good of all passengers.

Colin may also notice within his own community a frustration that a train speeds by twenty to 10 each morning going exactly where they want to go shopping.  He also notes that it has just spent six minutes twiddling its proverbial thumbs at the previous station, and suggests that an extra stop might be better use of its time, and generate some more revenue.  And knowing who to talk to, there's a chance of this happening - Colin's inputs will also be treated with considerable seriousness as he's not "just a passenger who doesn't understand how complicated these things are".

This is all very good for the railways - in fact, it might be a good idea to spread senior managers across all the lines as my contacts tell me that there's some clustering at the moment.   And - to my continued knowledge there isn't / wasn't / never was a cluster based at Melksham or anywhere else on the TransWilts.  I do understand that there may have been one (scarcely a large number) in the years leading up to and after privatisation, but I never came across him / her, and I was actually meeting customers / dropping them off at the station from the first week of the enhanced service in May 2001.

As regards to bigger changes, Colin can again be the eyes and ears of the railway industry and provide feedback - but these days there isn't stock lying around between the MO service and the next train it works which is the FO return.  So extra trains are hard fought, hard costed and pretty thoroughly justified.   I don't believe that a local resident manager at Melksham would as of him / herself bring a miraculous service improvement, and I've not seen that direct linkage at 7 other manager home stations that I knew/know of in recent years.

I used to commute between Westbury and Swindon on the line through Melksham daily from 1994 to 2002 (with a couple of year's gap in the middle). The regular commuters got to know each other quite well, being relatively small in number, and travelling on a one or two coach train. During that period, I was aware of two railway managers who regularly joined the train at Melksham, one from Railtrack and one from First Great Western. My recollection is that it is unlikely that either was in a role which would enable them to influence the quantum of train service through the station. There were also several Railtrack managers joining the train at Trowbridge and Chippenham. There were quite a few commuters who worked for the local authority in Swindon, and some in the financial services sector. I think at that time there were probably up to 10 daily commuters joining at Melksham station.

I also recollect that the number of train services on the route was able to be increased because Wessex Trains were, for a time, relieved of their responsibility to operate trains on the Swindon to Gloucester route, when Virgin Cross Country took it on for a while (a precursor to an intention, later abandoned, to operate regular through services from Birmingham to Paddington via Cheltenham). This meant that the train which arrived in Swindon no longer had to head up to Gloucester, but could go back the way it came, so an innovative manager (was it Chris Gibb?) took the opportunity to utilise the resource which became spare to run the through trains from Swindon to Salisbury and beyond.

I did take advantage of the service to travel home from Swindon in the early afternoon on a number of occasions (there was a train some time after 2pm). And the evening train sometime around 10pm was very useful after post work drinks!

The Great Western and BR (WR) were notorius for stopping trains at odd stations to pick up managers.

Up to the 60s we had a fast to from Taplow to Padd algedley for someone long gone but it remained in the timetable.

I believe places like Uffington and Wantage Raod had similar fasts to Padd.

And of course there was Badminton where I've stopped on an Up South Wales Express.

Why is the Marlow branch the most important line for FGW?

Said Wessex manager lived on the main road and the stops at Newton St Cyres weren't related to where he lived, rather to encourage visits to the Beer Engine.  There are slightly fewer stops now simply as the previous provision has been felt to be a little more than is needed.



 

I well remember how many years ago Charlbury station was to lose its coal fire in the waiting room but Sir Peter Parker, then BR Chairman was able to save it. Would that have been a service level influenced by locally resident management as he lived near to Charlbury station at Minster Lovell and commuted regularly to Lonmdon from Charlbury?

A certain FGW officer uses Pangbourne. Pangbourne is getting a car park extension, just one of three or four out of many needing extensions. Would that be another case?

They also got the new CIS and PA systems very early in the roll out, if I recall?

About time I bribe some managers to move to Worcester... >:(

Worcester is the @rse end of the Greater Western franchise area. Good luck with that Btline. I hope you've got deep pockets!  :P ;) ;D

Going back a good few years, I seem to remember that the reason that main line trains started calling at pewsey was for just some such reason. This was before the days of sectors, etc.

This has, of course, come up before: http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=781.msg3223#msg3219 (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=781.msg3223#msg3219). If you scroll down about four messages gaf71 (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?action=profile;u=91) had something to say about it then, too. 8)

The subject of managers living near stations and the effect of this on services is a thorny one for the moderator team here.  Even the remotest suggestion of cause (manager lives on line) and effect (something gets better) can lead to some very serious issues for us, and yet (as I pointed out earlier), it's natural and encouraged for any user to bring matters that need attention to the appropriate authorities, and if those users are rail industry managers / experts, they'll tend to know who to report to, what the pertinent facts are, and what to suggest as a practical resolution - thus having much more effect from their inputs that most of us.

Still don't know of any National Express / Wessex Trains managers who live(d) in Melksham though  ;)   BandHCommuter's suggestion that it was initiated with spare stock off the Stroud Valley is - to my knowledge - correct, but of course that went full circle and Stroud Valley is no longer in Cross Country again.  And, yes, it's very frustrating to see a train parked up in the Swindon bay for the majority of the time during the day.

Back in the Wessex days some of the Melksham were carting around fresh air so it's not surprising they were cut back to the mimimum if managers no longer needed to use these trains.

:o

Calm yourself, Btline: we've already established that this is probably an urban myth (or possibly a rural myth?), due to the lack of any credible evidence of specific Wessex Trains managers actually living in Melksham at that time.

Breathe ... out.

 ;)