Great Western Coffee Shop

A comment on another thread reminded me that on Tuesday lunchtime I was a passenger in a taxi on the Chippenham bypass, and saw a Freighliner train headed by 2 x Freighliner locomotives leaving the "via Melksham" line and heading up toward Swindon.

With Basingstoke blockaded for over a week, a lot of freight has been passing through Westbury station, presumably heading to/from Southampton Docks.

See link below for more on this.
http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/forum/index.php?topic=1949.msg4767#msg4767

Interesting to be looking back over a decade ... in those days, the fear was that freight traffic between Thingley and Bradford Junctions might take up so many of the available paths they would render it impractical for a passenger service with sufficient trains to work to be run.

Looking at today, the presence of freight and its potential growth in relation to HS2 construction is so much more of a positive as it helps make the case for capacity improvements to the benefit of all traffic.   If trains have the ability to pass one another somewhere in the middle of the single track section, it makes for two paths each way per hour, including operational and recovery factors to ensure that a delay to the 05:33 in the morning isn't still having knock ons such that it delays the final passenger train call at Melksham at 22:45.

Given how long it takes for Network Rail to grind through the process for even the simplest of infrastructure improvements, wouldn't the planning for this already be well under way? Else by the time it has been built, all the heavy earthmoving for the southern section of HS2 will be coming to an end.