Looking forward - a Wiltshire view.

[whole diary]

[grahame]

On this forum, we have been concentrating on the GW^» (Great Western - used as an abbreviation for the area / lines under the Great Western franchise, as opposed to FGW which includes "First", the company operating them too. For tickets - about) franchise - now into the final day for submission. On inputs that relate to the whole of the 'territory' covered and correlating those.  Aside from that at TransWilts, our chair Paul Johnson has been working on our main response - which I have posted at http://www.wellho.net/downloads/gwf_tw.pdf - and I have taken up some more esoteric and technical stuff at http://www.wellho.net/downloads/gwf_gep.pdf in my personal response, with support work that's been ongoing with SWR^» (South Western Railway - about)'s timetable consultation at the tail end of last year, and their stakeholder engagament which ended a week ago.  That work with SWR actually carries on - good phone chat this morning sorting out some of the timetabling issues raise.  The SWR package is all in a zip file at http://atrebatia.info/swr_tw_20180218.zip , or if you prefer separate printable files, http://atrebatia.info/swr_report.pdf and http://atrebatia.info/swr_report.pdf .  I have also (but not mine to publish ) inputs / final drafts from Railfuture, WWRUG^» (West Wiltshire Rail Users Group - about) and ACoRP^▸ (Association of Community Rail Partnerships) .  To each of those, thank you for taking the huge amount of time needed to put research and put the responses together.   And so we now have a couple of months where the consultation sponsors read, digest and corrolate the responses and decide how to vary their plans for their request for proposal / quotation for a 2 year direct award.

The exercise has been very useful for other reasons too, though.  It has made us (well me, anyway) think ahead, have thoughts on targets and objectives for the future.  Listen to others and help find a whole lot of common ground.  Learn what doors are likely to be open or openable in the future and which directions are shut off. Exhausting, but fun too!