Great Western Coffee Shop

I am delighted to announce that the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership has been accepted as a full member of the Association of Community Rail Partnerships - the national co-operation and co-ordination body for community support oranisations for lines and services away from "Inter-City" stuff.

Press release at http://atrebatia.info/acorp_press.pdf

A significant step as it will help us learn from others, and make it easier for us to be involved with national co-operative aspects.  I note already a meeting in the calendar for next month - briefing seminar at Marsham Street. Not only does this make us more effective, but it also makes it much more productive for the rail industry and rail industry govenance to work with us as we should now know a bit more about what we're doing, having been briefed from the centre.  Doesn't mean we won't continue to ask questions - we're all here for the passengers!

Congratulations to all involved, and hopefully this will result in some more good PR for the line.

It's a shame the quote from Horace Prickett contains such an inaccuracy. Apart from the fact that the service didn't ever stop, a meaningful service did exist from the mid 80s until Dec 2006 - Beeching isn't particularly relevant here.

Most excellent news!

My hearty congratulations to all involved.  ;D

It's not a clearcut "did / didn't" ...

Even from 1966 to 1985, a service ran - summer saturday only, one non-stop train on its way from variously Derby / Wolverhampton etc to Weymouth.    From 1985 to 2001 a commuter service to Swindon ran and there was nothing useful (as stated by HP) to Trowbridge / Westbury most of the time.  2001 to 2006 I'm going to describe as marginal, dealing well - in theory - with the single flow "commute to Swindon" but being infrequent the rest of the time and unreliable as it was always the first thing to cancel.  Also unadvertised

2014 is the first time since 1966 that we've seen a truly tuned, advertised, robust, appropriate, marketable service looking not only at running a train but also at providing a good flow-handler for most of the passengers in the corridor.

Further correspondence ...

The first from about a week ago. I have been tardy in posting and the delay in passing on congratulations from Paul Johnson is entirely mine.


And from Jane Scott, leader of Wiltshire Council, received during the past couple of days

News at ...

http://www.modern-railways.com/view_article.asp?ID=7904&pubID=37&t=0&s=0&sO=both&p=1&i=10

... and Lee and I went to an ACoRP meeting hosted by DfT in London last week;  I've had another CRP meeting yesterday and we have several next week.  Looking now to support passenger growth, and retain customer satisfaction and services for the future.

Indeed: I, too, congratulate grahame and his team here on gaining membership of ACoRP - it was worth the effort, and we look forward to developing our TransWilts community rail partnership with the support of many other established and experienced partnerships.  :)