Great Western Coffee Shop

Claire Perry, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport with responsibility for rail fares, rail franchising, freight and logistics and transport agencies, will be visiting Melksham this coming Friday afternoon / meeting with a small group of "business interests".   I am asked "Are you able to give me details about what you would like to discuss" ...

Background, from Tom Skinner  |  Campaign Manager for Michelle Donelan:


I have a good supply of midnight oil which I shall be burning tonight, and I would welcome inputs;  a quick email exchange has established that the meeting should take place (although past experience is that these things often vary a bit or are even last-minute cancelled)

More to follow on this is emails / p.m.s etc locally; this is a first post - inputs welcome overnight

Are you looking for TWCRP officers to attend, grahame?  If so, I may well be able to do so - me being on annual leave this week.  ;)

It would be good to have the strength of your experience available, Chris ... pencil it in please

Already done - and even if the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport's visit is cancelled or postponed in the meantime, I will take a train (or two!) to Melksham anyway.  ;D

From a business point of view I would like to point out the very high per mile cost of anytime fares to London (was it 84p per mile you quoted in a recent post).  Leisure travellers are usually able to travel off peak and most commuters can use the heavily discounted season tickets. It is the occasional business traveller, or rather the businesses that they work for, that are forced to pick up the huge cost of anytime train travel. A typical business meeting will almost always start at 10:30 or earlier and thus the business traveller is forced to pay for an anytime ticket. 

The disparity between anytime fares where they have been the regulated fares and other areas is unjustifiable, particularly as the boundaries between these areas are arbitrary.

I suggest the discussion should be more related to issues that are specific to the TransWilts service, rather than a more general one such as the topic of peak fares.

Once you've explained how successful the service has been to date, my instinct would be to focus on the possible threat to the peak service once IEP is introduced and to emphasise the importance of retaining choice for commuters. And then to explain the opportunity that an additional unit would bring, and the efficient use it could be put to.

Thanks, John R.  ;)

Yes, the PUSST (see my post above for her full title) happens to be the local MP for Devizes - and she will (hopefully) be visiting Melksham to discuss local railway and transport issues there.

I look forward to meeting her.  :D

Lets hope she doesn't get a move to a newly created Department for Youth.  ;D

Will she drive there or just drive from Devizes to Chippenham and catch a train from there ?

It probably depends whether she's travelling to Melksham from her home in Broad Chalke near Salisbury, or from Westminster.  ;)

I'm meeting someone off the 2 p.m. ish arrival if you want a lift .... OR see you earlier

My apologies, grahame - during this morning, it became clear that I would not be able to travel after all, due to family circumstances.  :-[

You missed a very interesting meeting, Chris ... full report and link to slide copy in the public TransWilts area at
http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=14449.0

Claire Perry came across as well informed / well briefed, and with good knowledge beyond what she had been told to be able to ask excellent questions and follow up on their discussions.  I am confident that any negative service changes on the TransWilts in the direct award from 2015 will NOT be because of any lack of information or input, and indeed I'm pretty well sure that we have nailed any prospect of the service slipping to just the new trains.   I believe that she also went away very much aware than a significant element of the success is due to local community work / information / research, although that lies very much on top of a line that meets a natural travel flow and so is (frankly) not going to be too hard a battle to populate with people;   I would rather have Melksham than Mallaig as a source of people to fill trains in the winter!

Michelle Donelan was very quiet (but then she had brought the minister, so it was to be expected that she would listen and encourage us to make use of the opportunity).

It was also good to be able to look forward to joined up aspirations beyond the period from 2015 - looking at capacity improvements due to signalling changes and even redoubling;  good to see such things no longer impossible, but actually in vision.  Also looking forward to post-IEP changes and joined up solutions for the TransWilts south of Westbury, and other prospects such as sharing trains with the Stroud Valley line should their aspiration of a second (i.e. local) train each hour come about.

Whilst I obviously get and wouldn't disagree with your point about the TransWilts being a line that meets a natural travel flow, I wouldn't want it to be misread as "build it and they will automatically come".

Having gained a lot of experience (both as part of my day job and as a CRP volunteer) going door to door talking to residents along the TransWilts corridor and trying to persuade them to use public transport, I can tell you that, while there is obviously a huge amount of goodwill regarding what we are all collectively trying to achieve, it can be a battle in certain areas (predominantly parts of Chippenham & Trowbridge but also certain areas of the mainly-benign Melksham too) where people have become so used to using their cars as a default option.

This is where I would tend to agree with Claire Perry - due in no small part to our collective graft on the ground, we have manage to persuade an impressive number of people who are not by nature inclined towards public transport to honour us with their trust and patronage over the first year. However, the real challenge will be for both us and the service itself to prove worthy of retaining that trust and patronage, and continuing to attract & keep more passengers on that basis, over the medium to long term.

Anyone reading this should be in no doubt whatsoever of our determination to make it so - There is certainly no complacency here.