Great Western Coffee Shop

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

It's just 30 miles by rail from Westbury to Swindon ... and the occasional trains with just three intermediate stops are allowed a generous 45 to 50 minutes.

"The bus is slower because it serves lots of intermediate places" they tell me.   Balderdash - when there's a bus running, it's slower because the road system around these parts simply wasn't built to provide a reasonably fast journey between the Wiltshire towns - even an "express" bus serving just Trowbridge, Melksham and Chippenham takes twice as long as the train.

How do I prove that?   I don't have to - the Train Operating Company is running buses today (Saturday) because of the engineering works near Bath (yes, I know, Bath isn't actually anywhere near the line!) and those buses are scheduled to take 90 minutes.

I'm using this Saturday bus schedule as an example - to show just how slow and inappropriate such a service is between the major Wiltshire towns served.

There has been conflicting information as to whether trains or buses are running on the TransWilts during the "Bath" engineering works - and I now have an answer from FGW (actually it popped into my inbox a few days ago but got overlooked in a flurry of spam - so I owe an apology for not posting earlier!)

11/12 October - was a train
18/19 October - is a Bus
25/26 October - will be a Bus
1/2 November - train, but some timeing changed
8/9 November - Bus
15/ 16 November onwards - train to normal timings

The email also tells me that the replacement of trains by buses on the weekends shown above is due to engineering works on those particular weekends on one of more of the TransWilts legs, so that this isn't directly related to the works actually happening at Bath / Batheaston