Here we are - what
GWR▸ advertise as Trowbridge to Melksham the weekend ...
Top line showing what has run, what has been cancelled so far ... bottom line, we are waiting to see.
9 trains scheduled so far. 4 cancelled, 4 ran more or less to schedule, and 1 ran 40 minutes late and only as far as Chippenham.
I can tell you about that delayed and truncated one. I arrived at Trowbridge Station at 12:00 to catch the train if it was running, or to walk up to Trinity Church to catch the 12:09 bus if it wasn't.
Train showing "on time". But then as it was due, it slipped a couple of minutes. Then the board flagged up "correction" and the 12:18 (Cardiff, I recall) moved to 1st train and the Swindon marked "delayed". Way too late to catch the 12:09 bus - ah well, these things happen short term.
But then after a wait - about 12:25, someone asked at the ticket counter and the clerk there looked it up and told us that the train to form the service was coming down to Westbury on the back of another service, and it would be about half an hour late by the time the train reached us. The clerk was asked why we weren't too earlier, but we were told that the clerk had only just heard about the delay. Asked why there hadn't been earlier advise so that we could catch the bus, we we told that the clerks know nothing about the buses (I wonder if the ticket office staff when moved to customers assistance roles will actually have the sort of useful customer information that was lacking yesterday)
"Delayed" switched to "Expected 12:44"
A few minutes later (12:30), the (announced as) 2 car but actually 4 car Salisbury train stopped on its way to Westbury. 2 cars detached 12:36 to 12:46 there - eventually we left Trowbridge at 12:53, back into Melksham at 13:04.
23 passenger on board from Trowbridge. 3 off at Melksham and an extra 14 joined. So that's
37/17 the way we used to log it - 37 passengers using the train of whom 17 were Melksham specific. How much of that was effected by the delay and previous train cancellation?
I don't know, but during the wait I did meet a family of four who had gone to the station for the 09:58 train with prepurchased tickets for a day out in Oxford, "via Swindon". They were already disappointed at having lost a couple of hours; I suggested they could change at Bath but (no) their tickets said via Swindon; their English was not good and I suspect they're guests from Ukraine. When the board changed from "Swindon" to "Chippenham" as the destination, they near-panicked. I suggested that they get the next train and change at Bath or Chippenham; they went to ask at the ticket office and I didn't see them again - they may have gone via Bath, they may have given up their day trip - they certainly weren't on the service via Melksham.
Edit to add - for the archive record - there is no industrial action on GWR this weekend.
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