Great Western Coffee Shop

Have you ever walked around an industrial estate / business area on a winter's Sunday evening?  It's an erie experience ... the bright lights and occasional cars on the main road are replaced by a darkness punctured by the occasional bulb, the noise of the cars by a deep and lonely silence that has you wondering if the worl has come to an end, and they forgot to tell you.

I walked down one of our industrial estates last night, and tried to read the notice board at the bottom.  I failed, for the only illumination in that area is a faint glow from behind ... a glow just bright enough to tell me it was a railway timetable, but nowhere near bright enough to be able to read it.  But, alas, the service here is so sparse that I know it be heart ... 17:20 to Swindon, 19:45 to Swindon, and that's about it ... and it was about 17:40.

I walked over to the information point, and pressed the button on it.  A red light came on.  Nothing tells me what the red light means, but judging by the lack of any other response, it means that the system is broken.  A notice - this time in the light so I can read it - gives me a number to call for further information, but there's no phone box that I can see, no directions to one, and I don't usually carry a mobile.

There's a shadowy figure on the platform - complete with rucksack - and I hang around in expectation of something happening.

Silence.

Then a distant rumbling and two great white lights can be seen like eyes in the distance, and getting closer and slowing down and into this unlikely spot, at a time when nothing is shown on any of the schedules at the station (even if there was enough light to read them!) rolls "The Ghost Train" ...

to be continued

So for someone who does not visit Melksham.............is it that there are no trains other than these sparse visitors

Or, that they pass through there but do not stop.

I've never been too sure which is the case

I'm liking this serial thriller! I look forward to the next instalment...

The train comes to a halt with a hissing of brakes, and a single pair of doors opens and two people step onto the platform - one rapidly disappearing into the gloom, and the other hovering near the door.  "I don't have a ticket - can I buy one from you?" I ask, having been warned in the past that to board a train without a ticket (unless there's no staff on duty AND there's a ticket machine that's not working at the station), and the figure stands back to let me on. Rucksack man joins as well, the figure with whom I've spoken gets on, the doors close and the monster roars into action, heading on up the line.

The 17:05 from Westbury didn't run on Sunday - but there was no notice of that at Melksham station.  An extra service, which I had only 'picked up' on from the Westbury departure boards a couple of hours earlier, ran at 17:30 from there, calling at Melksham at 17:45.  There was no notice of that at Melksham station either.  To be fair to FGW, there WAS a notice there announcing a retiming of a train on the previous day; on Saturdays, the afternoon train from Westbury sometimes runs half an hour early and if you miss that one, the next one is the 17:05 on Sunday.

The train wasn't busy - there were between twelve and fifteen passengers as we rode - very smoothly and fast over what seemed like a beautifully aligned track - and by the time I had purchased my ticket (a 5.70 off peak day return and walked through the two coaches to see how busy the train was, we pulled into Chippenham.  A couple of folks got off, one on, and after a brief stop we were on our way up to Swindon, where we arrived at ten past six - two minutes early, according to the arrivals board.

I chatted with one person who was travelling on his own (who I knew), and a family group so came over to stroke my dog, who loves travelling on the train.  I learned only a handful of people had been on the train from Westbury. This is hardly a surprise, as Westbury is primarily a junction of six routes, and the retimed and scarsely-advertised TransWilts service departed in glorious isolation after a gap of over half an hour in which nothing had been scheduled to arrive from any of the connecting routes. The numbers doubled at Trowbridge - although an intermediate station, Trowbridge is the county town and there is significant rail use there - and many Trowbridgians want to go to Swindon, which is very much "Wiltshire's City" even though it's not a city and it's in Wiltshire by postal address only these days.  I also learned how much the people on the service prefer the TransWilts over other means of transport along this corridor, and had gone to the trouble to research the day's service and had adjusted there plans to make sure they could use this oddly timed train - the first of the day.

To be concluded ...

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In answer to questions. Only four times a day (Monday through Saturday) and three times a day (Sunday) are passenger trains scheduled to pass along the section of the TransWilts line from Chippenham to Trowbridge, and they are all scheduled to stop at Melksham, giving Westbury, Trowbridge and Melksham two journeys to, and two journeys from (one on Sunday) Chippenham and Swindon.

I'm very careful to say "scheduled". You would have thought, 18 days including 3 Sundays into the year, that was 73 trains.  But the actual number that have called to schedule is only in the 50s (best guess 56), with a handful being altered significantly, and one extra train after 10 O'clock one night.

More passenger trains - I would estimate somewhere over 20, but under 40, have passed through without stopping. These include a train every hour that passed through one evening when the scheduled service had been cancelled due to bad weather, and various services on diversion - in fact, I'm guessing that the change to the time on Sunday was due to the "path" of the scheduled train being wanted for another service that was off its normal route.

Freight trains also pass through Melksham - stone traffic from Somerset headed towards London, container traffic from Southampton headed for the Midlands and the North. It's a bit hard to get a "grip" on the volume of this, but it's a further significant reason for the line being there.  Clearly, the days on the "mixed train" where a coach is attached to a freight train are gone, and we can't realistically suggest that a regular freightliner provide a direct passenger service too, to Swindon, Oxford, Leamington Spa ...

I don't know, you may have hit on something there Graham. How about a passenger container? Could have windows and seats and be attached to the first wagon behind the engine?

Oh dear; I 've just remembered I've reinvented a unpowered Pacer a passenger compartment on a freight wagon.

So what comes around comes around.

I have noticed in the past that Freightliners seem to do the distance from Oxford to Southampton in a very similar time to X-Country passenger services on the same route. They seem to be more reliable too...

At Swindon, our little two car train wheased to a halt alongside one of the main platforms, rejecting the mere bay platform, and the passengers disappeared into the dark.  It always seems to be dark on the TransWilts, the train so shy and keen to avoid the attention of photographers that it doesn't run in daylight.

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What's amazing is not how few passengers there are on this service, but how many.  It wasn't publicised - even for the normal  times, you need to look up the timetable labelled "Portsmouth to Cardiff" to find the occasional train (that 17:45 was the first Sunday train, even though the day was already done). Even though there are 40 different timetables published - separate even for lines like Liskeard to Looe - for travel "TransWilts" from Salisbury, Westbury and Trowbridge to Melksham, Chippenham and Swindon you have to look to a booklet headlined for quite different places.  The local tourist information centre complains that it can't get any timetables at all to help inform visitors, and the trains time change - not always later, sometimes earlier, and it's hit and miss as to whether any notices are posted.  The station is uninviting, there's no way to find out whether a train will be along or if it fails to turn up what has happened to it. It's a long cry from the summers of 2005 and 2006, when I travelled the line in daylight, with up to five return trips a day, and many trains "nesting" - Nearly Every Seat Taken and the people who set up the current state of the station and service should be ashamed of themselves.