Great Western Coffee Shop

In my 'Press and Publicity' role, I get all sorts of questions ... and end up writing potentially useful (quotable) chunks of text.   I'll post a load of them here - useful if any of you / us wants further quotes - "how was that worded before" as well as available for comment / thoughts on improvement.  Probably one chunk per post is sensible, so here goes ...

To Google (ex usenet news) group uk.railways at
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/uk.railway/1IOGu2DCjyI )
where comment was that "suddenly" (!!) service had improved on the Transwilts.   Characterise the posters, by the look of things, as know quite a bit about rail but not really about how it works in Wessex.

Potentially a good summary for knowledgable rail types from afar, who are coming across us as a new story

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I'm the Press and Publicity person for the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership - set up a while back, formalised last year, and probaby applying for ACoRP membershio to become an official CRP (now that we have a marketable train service back - yes, I note some of you ask it it's enough) if so voted by our AGM next month.  Some links you might like to take a look at if you want to read (much) deeper in ...

http://atrebatia.info/
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?board=18.0
https://www.facebook.com/TransWilts

The additional services are provided ('seed funding support') under an LSTF (local sustainable transport fund) grant from the DfT to Wiltshire council and operated by First Great Western. They're for an initial three year period, and other elements of the fund grant cover assoiated elements such as certain bus links, personal travel planning, the 'Connecting Wiltshire' web site, etc ... and, yes, we have passenger level objectives to have the service carried on as part of the next main franchise.  First Great Western, Wiltshire Council, and local volunteers are all working very well together in many ways on this - we all want it to work.

Rolling stock was / is a significant issue, and the new services (6 each way per day) are operated by a single class 153 unit.  To extend to Salisbury would reduce the frequency from every 2 hours to every 3 hours on the section that previously has just 2 trains each way per day (06:12 and 18:44 from Swindon!) ... the extra shuttles give a second peak train into Swindon in the morning, and an earlier departure in the eveining making the train practical for commuting.   We have not tried, half-hearted,  to answer every passenger fow so that we succeed at none - rather we have gone for the major flows and to time the train to get them right. See http://melksh.am/4146 which shows how one daily opportunity to go to Swindon - for 11 hours - has been augmented to 30 opportunities, many of which are very attractive.

Comparison to the 5 a day to 2005?  That was a very different service - morning and evening peak, one during the day, and a very late and very early train.  And it was a knife-edge decision to "pull" it, based on growth forecast of 0.8% ... which turned out to be 8.0% growth in the 2 years from measuing to pulling the service.  It wasn't well know about and had a poor reputation for reliability.   Much hard work has gone into addressing these issues.

I have to agree that an hourly service would probably 'sell' to the extent that each train would convey more passengers than each train in the two-hourly cycle (in other words, double the trains again and you'll get more than twice the traffic). However, we have a single line section from Thingley to Bradford junctions, and freight and diverted long distance expresses coming through, and an extra train might well require an intermediate loop or (at the least) signal.  And you start looking at service robustness issues too.   You also look at a timetable recast around the area, which wasn't an option in December 2013 - in fact we had to work quite hard to get the extra service, which was a fully funded option in the aborted next GW franchise, into the "steady state" interim 2 years.   That's also a further reason that Salisbury would have been one step too far AT THIS STAGE.

Casework done shows that Royal Wootton Bassett would work operationally for the TransWilts train to stop, and the extra stop would not slow the service down so much as to put people off.  So, yes, very much supportive.  However, with a train only every 2 hours for a 10 minute run into Swindon, there are interesting metric to consider.  The service does not depend on a future RWB station, but the TransWilts team would welcome it and be delighted to serve it.

South from Westbury to Salisbury, you have an hourly Cardiff to Portsmouth semifast, and a collection of other services - 2 a day to Brighton, 3 a day to London (SWT), 2 a day to Salisbury (1 x SWT, 1 x FGW), 3 a day to Southampton, and some more (4 or 5?) short workings to Warminster. In some hours there are no intermediate trains between the "Portsmouth"s and in other hours there are several, with intervals as short as 10 minutes bewteen trains - 11:01 and 11:11 from Westbury to Portsmouth and to Southampton, same stops except that the 11:11 serves Dilton Marsh. That looks odd ... but in fact it's needed to keep both clockface Cardiff - Portsmouth AND Plymouth / Exeter to Southampton (arr. Westbury 11:04) customers happy. Come a recast of trains on main lines from Paddington - electrification, IEP, etc, the extension through to Salisbury of the Swindon to Westbury TransWilts service, taking over much of the collection, would seem logical.

Frome?   Very much in our sights, although in Somerset. Firstly, there's an important commuter flow from there to Swindon.  Secondly, it's almost identical in size to Melksham and so makes a very good benchmark of what can be done with a train every couple of hours in these parts.   Weymouth?  The SLC which is in the public domain, all be it a bit obscure, calls for a summer Sunday early train Westbury - Swindon - Westbury which will run on through to Weymouth. We tried that as an experiment in the summer of 2011 - complaints of overcrowding, AND complaints that people didn't hear about it. Oh - and we ended up with a 6 car train on a five car line.  Monday to Friday we're working for better Weymouth connections from May, Sunday it will be a through train.  Saturday we're not even going to try as the Heart of Wessex trains are already rammed!

For the local free paper in Melksham, who are looking to fill their next issues with local news and a review of some aspects of 2013.


We (Melksham Railway Development Group, Save the Train Campaign) started off with a clear strategy.   (a)  to make sure people knew there was a case for an APPROPRIATE train service to be looked at , (b) to get the case technically evaluated to come up with the best appropriate service, (c) to get that service implemented and (d) to ensure that the new service works well for people and is retained.  We're now into the fourth - and potentially longest stage and with the most work to do, but then we also have lots more people - community, councils and rail industry all pulling in the same direction.  Although there were elements of campaigning early on,  we concentrate on working with people and organisations as far as we can, and to understand their goals and objectives, and technical matters to, and to work with people for mutual gain / forward movement via practical and strong aspirations.

A useful train service - which we now have - improves the quality of life for the town.  It helps businesses thrive because people can visit more easily - and that means jobs and prosperity. It helps residents travel to college, to work, to visit friends and family, and to sports, shopping and leisure activities.  It helps attract and retain a mobile active workforce, and maintain or raise property values.  For every pound spent on the new service, there's an estimated economic gain of nearly 3 pounds in the area, and together with other projects for the future, such as the new school opened at the start of this decade, the new Rugby and Football clubs now in planning, the new Campus, the Canal and so on, we're building a Melksham for the future - and one that's more sustainable for that future too.  If the new services attract plenty of passengers (please help us by using the train, and letting us know how it could be improved further) this may only be the first step.  In the work we've done, we've compared Melksham to many other towns that have gone before us.  Redditch used to have just 2 trains a day ^ and that has risen to 2 per hour.  The average number of journeys per person from Redditch by train in a year has risen to 28 times that in Melksham for last year, and there are approved plans in Redditch to lay extra tracks to allow the service to rise to 3 per hour.  You'll see that sort of progress ahead over coming years in Melksham; in coming months there will be improvements in station accessibility, in information, and you'll see that the changes in the first few weeks (already showing promising signs) are just the tip of the iceberg.