Great Western Coffee Shop

from fgw website today.


17:02 Worcester Foregate Street to Southampton Central due 20:48
This train will be started from Westbury.It will no longer call at: Worcester Foregate Street, Worcester Shrub Hill, Ashchurch For Tewkesbury, Cheltenham Spa, Gloucester, Stonehouse, Stroud, Kemble, Swindon, Chippenham, Melksham and Trowbridge.This is due to an earlier broken down train.

Road replacement transport is being sourced between Cheltenham Spa and Swindon.

Last Updated: 10/07/2009 17:48


I just feel it seems a little unfair for them to 'source transport' for just the cheltenham to swindon stretch, which has a lot more trains compared to melksham! what do the people of melksham do to get home?!

The people of Melksham (and the people who travel from Swindon and Chippenham to Trowbridge, Westbury and onwards too) have had plenty of practise at this, and are very resourceful  ;)

Option 1. There is at least one regular who takes his bicycle with him, and will cycle home along the Wilts and Berks canal towpath - part of the national cycling route - as it's a lovely summers evening.

Option 2. If the 19:01 on Friday does not run, they could catch the next train which is 15:36 on Saturday. (National Rail Enquiries advised me to 'wait for the next train' when I called them once in the other direction - from Melksham)

Option 3. Well dressed travellers can ask the ticket clerk in a loud voice "excuse me - the train to Melksham has been cancelled when is the next one" and - with luck - they will be overheard and one of the people from Melksham who's waiting to meet their partner off the following train from London, who will offer them a lift

Option 4. (The official one) have a word with the station staff at Chippenham who are very familiar indeed with this circumstance, and will arrange taxi(s).  The staff at Chippenham do an excellent job in this circumstance - I can't praise them enough

Option 5. There is an irregular evening bus service (route 234) from the station forecourt at Chippenham which goes via Melksham.

In all seriousness, I have an overseas visitor arriving this evening from London to Melksham by public transport ... he has already been on the phone and I am heading out to 'rescue' him.  The locals may be resilient and knowledgable, but tourists are not so well informed.

If the Melksham Flyer gets canned, we do provide road transport from Chippenham or Trowbridge. Road transport alterfnatives only go on the net once they have been confirmed in place. I suggest that when you looked at the site, the first bit had been confirmed, but not the second part of the route. I am sure that if you rechecked the website a bit later on, then Melksham would have been covered

The last update I have on record is the one shown, which was unchanged at 20:45.  By that time, the short-run from Westbury would have been in Southampton, and by 21:15 the record was gone. No, I don't think it did appear later on the site.

The operations staff at Chippenham (the end of the line I use most often so know better) are very helpful if asked in making alternative arrangements, and they have had a lot of practise.   

It's got far better since the dark days two years ago when we had to extend the axes on our cancellation rate graph not once but three times - all credit to Andrew Haines and Mark Hopwood for that.  But the service remains pathetic and inappropriate for a line than links the major Wiltshire population centres, with the key players all agreeing that the current train service is not best suited to serve the people in the travel corridor who want to use them ... they've just each found reasons they can't themselves actually fix the acknowledged problem ... thus far.

I had to have a chuckle about a notice I recently saw advertising a meeting about public transport in the area.
The notice not only gave the location and time of the meeting but helpfully listed the times of the trains from the surrounding towns for would be attendees. Every town listed had a train going to the meeting, every town listed had a train back after the meeting - except one !  Melksham had "no service".

I wondered if this was raised at the meeting!