Great Western Coffee Shop

The new car park at Melksham Station is now tarmaced, whit lined, and ready for use!

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/melkshamstationcarpark.jpg)

I've blogged about it at: http://www.wellho.net/mouth/4475_.html
I've facebooked it at https://www.facebook.com/TransWilts/posts/645130702253642

We stepped up from a handful of spaces by adding a second handful about a year ago - and this new parking area now adds about 20 more.    That's about right for the moment - we've been finding that people have been unable to park in recent weeks, and that should now be a thing of the past - at least for a short while.

Most TransWilts stations are in or near the centre of the towns which they serve, to the detriment of out of ton traffic.   For the main car parks at both Chippenham and Trowbridge, you need to negotiate the built up areas / town centres to get to the stations - which isn't very clever if you're driving to the station from a village in order to take a train somewhere else.   Swindon's just as bad; Westbury and Bradford-on-Avon are a little better from some directions.    Melksham is a bit different, though.  Although the station's only 10 minutes walk from the town bridge (over the river Avon), it's also almost on top of the junction of the A350 (trunk road from Chippenham south via Westbury) and A365 (Bath to Devizes), and village traffic can get to the station from many villages ... we are now the natural driver's railhead (certainly if going to Swindon) from:
Sell's Green. Seend. Bulkington. Keevil. Great Hinton. Steeple Ashton. West Ashton. Yarnbrook. Hilperton. Holt, Broughton Gifford. Shaw. Atworth.

Also - more arguably - Melksham provides a railhead for further places such as Gastard, Corsham and Bratton (I mention those three specifically because I know of used being made from those places) - as well as from the town itself.

Readers may feel there's a bit of a sales pitch in this post.  Correct - I want it to work!   Please do share any of my links above, or this post.  I really don't mind having to recruit extra people to help count passengers when we do a survey - in fact it's great to have good numbers to be able to do so.

Plenty of space on the rail link bus too ... although passenger numbers are now up into double figures on some runs!

Is it free (for now) or pay and display?

It's free just for now.   I'm not sure how long that will remain the case, though;  Wiltshire Council have written to us suggesting they're looking to charge for its use (and presumable its upkeep) even though it was externally funded for them ... but then they also say they're charging for parking at Melksham House and have had the ticket machine there covered for many months and haven't been bothering to collect - in fact I have a letter in to them suggesting that they collect that money, which has to be used for transport, and use it to keep the Melksham Rail Link Bus running beyond the summer when the LSTF funding for it ceases.

It's been suggested it won't exactly be "pay and display", but rather you'll pay be mobile phone, sending in your registration by text and so there will be nothing to display.   Since the station area is notorious for poor phone reception (note all the troubles with the information point), I remain a little unsure as to how practical these plans are, but we will see.

If Wiltshire Council do go down a charging route then I assume they would use the system they currently use for this: Mipermit. As far as I am aware this covers all Wiltshire Council managed car parks - including Bradford-on-Avon Station car park.

https://secure.mipermit.com/wiltshire/application/home.aspx - this is the Wiltshire Council Mipermit portal.

I have never used the text service for this as I mainly use it for season ticket use - all paperless. I can say from experience that the system works really well and is surprisingly customer friendly - for example I can register two cars for the same season ticket and actually swap to a different car and back whenever I wish online - very handy for letting my mother or sister park when I am not using it that day! [and all completely legit - there is a clause about "reasonable" changing of car numbers in t&cs but I can imagine it could be abused without that]

Concerns about people without access/ability to use to the system aside, it could be a lot worse than this one. If the money has to fund other transport things then that is a big plus from my point of view.

Yes, TeaStew, I think that system was mentioned to me.  Slight concern in that it uses mobile phones, and there's a distinct hole in the coverage / coverage quality on some networks on Station Approach; I have experienced it, and it's also the reason that we're given for such intermittent operation of the help point, which uses a mobile phone signal.  Thank goodness that (I understand) the TVM will be on a wired line, but that's lead to other problems like a good old-fashioned delay in getting the line connected.  I though the days of 9 month waits for phone lines had long since gone after telephones were split off from the Royal Mail, but it seems they're still alive and kicking in Melksham!