Saturday, 13th July 2024 - MEG at the Carnival

Meet MEG - the Melksham Environment Group, and please join us on 13th July

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The Melksham Environment Group is an unincorporated association formed in spring 2024 to educate, inform, inspire, involve and empower all those living, working or visiting the Melksham Community Area in averting, mitigating or adapting to, the Climate Crisis.

The group works on a partnership ethos and aims to fulfil its aims through and with the established community organisations such as (but not limited to) town, parish and unitary councils and their subgroups and committees within the Melksham Area. The group is also working in close liaison with other like minded groups in the wider parliamentary constituency and next tier authority area

Project No. 1 was our hustings with a "Climate and Nature" theme run alongside groups from Bradford-on-Avon, Devizes and Calne - towns which are fully or partly in the new Melksham and Devizes constituency.

Project No. 2 will be a presence at the Melksham Carnival next Saturday - that's 13th July 2024. The carnival brings out the town (and even if England reach the Euros final, it will not clash) and MEG will be distributing printed leaflets including train timetables (yes, really) to that hard-to-reach base population who are not currently rail users, but perhaps could be.

"We" based in Melksham have "done it before" ... a wonderful walking group. Friends from many places across the region have done it before. A number of you who will be reading this, in public but in this somewhat niche online location of the Great Western Coffee Shop, joined us and we had a fantastically useful afternoon. And I will ask and encourage you, if you would like, to join us again next Saturday. Please let me know.

Taking part in the carnival parade is a real pleasure. We start (this year) from King's Street Car Park at 6 p.m., so that's a 5:30 (ish) arrival there and the parade takes about 90 minutes until we are "released". That's in time to catch the 20:09 train from Melksham (and there and now later trains both ways). Leaflets, tabards to give us a uniform look, water, briefing note all planned. Watering holes such as our home and in town planned, and if the trains are up the Swanee, lifts to a station in a neighbouring town will be available as "plan B".

Here is the "final draft" of the timetable page to be handed out. Please let me know of any gross errors you spot today. This is the "low res" web version. Final size 297mm x 105mm. Click on image to see it larger, but still in a web resolution

Our local train service has had reliability issues, especially at the weekend, and because of that has been unmarketable for weekend trips out. However, cancellations during the week have not been as dire, and promotion for local weekday travel, with only limited needs to play the double jeaopardy of connections can realistically be promoted to our residents and that is so important for the day to day bread and butter use of the service and its maintenance and growth over the next five years under a new government regime.