Yes - served by trains operated by Transport for Wales, Cross Country and Forest of Dean Railway Limited. During engineering works, Great Western Railway also pass through.

 
For the benefit of our readers, I can confirm that this is grahame posting.



As an side, having got to know them quite well, I can tell you that the dog on the left is the noisy one and the dog on the right is the naughty one.

They are both great characters - as is grahame. 

 
Lydney? 5541, the number of the loco, is resident there

 

Stop press - I wrote before the end of service - a further round trip cancelled, again because GWR didn't provide a working train and crew to run it, so we're up to 6 out of 18 cancelled, which is 33%.

 
Can you believe - it's now well over a year since the big old laptop that was supposed to last me through retirement got drowned at the Melksham Splash Pad ... and with it access to my old Facebook profile was lost.   It was something of a struggle to establish a new profile, because so many people didn't believe that this new account really was / is me; it started with all the hallmarks of a spam / phishing account such as being very new, and with very few friends.   However, the struggle is much reduced as the new profile is firmly established.

I encourage Coffee Shop members on Facebook to befriend me at
https://www.facebook.com/graham.ellis.melksham/
where the profile looks like this:

you'll find lots of posts "obviously me" there, and lots of friends - many whom are likely to be mutual

My LinkedIn profile is at
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wellho/
where my profile looks like this:


My blog is at:
https://grahamellis.uk/blog.html
Email:
graham @ sn12.net

I need to catch up on Instagram and BlueSky, and I have dropped X.  Various other sites and presences, but the above are the main ones relevant to friends and Coffee Shop members.

 
21:16 Westbury to Swindon due 21:58
21:16 Westbury to Swindon due 21:58 will be cancelled.
This is due to a fault on this train.

22:31 Swindon to Westbury due 23:12
22:31 Swindon to Westbury due 23:12 will be cancelled.
This is due to a fault on this train

 

I could give further clues such as it's a town that's served by three different train operators.  But you may feel mislead by that hint in due course.

 

Well, that's a fairly wide area, from which the rest of us can only guess.

 

Ten years on - 4 cancellations out of 18  today, which is 22%.  Sadly, I can't say that this sort of rate shocks me these days or is unusual. Because I quote the figure for one day, the PR team will explain why today was especially bad and for sure it was worse than many days.   Today was 22% cancellation, yesterday was 14%, day before everything ran (but we had multiple cancellations of the connections we tried to get back from Weymouth - ask Mike and Olena who were with me and also held up 2 hours!), the day before that was 11% cancellations, and so I could go on.

 
That’s because none of them are Taunton Chris 

 

It's one that I expected to stick - even though I went there on a Freedom of Severn and Solent.

 
12. I have no idea.  I didn't do so well on part 1 of your quiz, grahame. 

 
My aunt on the maternal side used to live in Tavistock - now in Lydford, Devon.

17. Tavistock Canal. 

 
1. St Ives (Cornwall) - GBM
2. Hayling Island - Oxonhutch
3. Sway - Oxonhutch
4. Exmouth - eightonedee
5. Dorchester - Timmer
6. Netley - CyclingSid
7. Paddington - stuving
8. Totnes - AMLAG
9. Corfe Castle - Bradshaw
10. Hamble - TonyN
11. Bath - PhilWakely
12. Not yet identified

 
13. Taunton (Bathpool) - stuving
14. Pilning - Western Pathfinder
15. Cardiff Bay - ChrisB
16. Oxford - Mark A
17. Not yet identified
18. Melksham - Chris from Nailsea
19. Weston-super-Mare - eightonedee
20. Dundas - John D
21. Portsmouth - Surrey 455
22. Melksham - Oxonhutch
23. Swindon - Prestbury Road
24. Plymouth (Saltram) - Chris from Nailsea

 
and

 
GWR 8/10 for "comfort"  !!  A fleet of mainly IETs, 165/6s ........................comfortable

I note the author of this article is billed as a "Destination expert" - the mind boggles at that description.

 

Agreed: I've become something of a convert to the bus service from Melksham to Bath Spa station.

 
From the BBC:

 
All very subjective, but no surprises to see CrossCountry propping up the table!

 

And the Westbury to Swindon train that forms it too ...

 
17:35 Swindon - Westbury cancelled because of a broken down train

 
The soldier in the middle appears to be Canadian, noting the maple leaves on his collar.

 
I was surprised to see that GWR was as high as third.

I have a great jigsaw based on that 1948 picture of Waterloo  Station. It's in two halves, one featuring that picture, the other the same scene during the Second World War, with people in the same poses in uniform and that column of bearskinned soldiers in khaki.

(Assembling both pairs of clocks can be challenging.)

 
I think that the carriage in this pic may also have been ex LSWR. One window has "AME" painted above it right on the margin of the print, leading to the assumption that this was a scene at Amesbury in Wiltshire and a railhead for Salisbury Plain.

I couldn't recognise the roof tops beyond the carriage as being at that station, nor at Bulford, the civilian terminus of the  branch off the Basingstoke-Salisbury line. I enlarged the image to examine the magazines on display. One was Popular Mechanics, an American magazine. Below the bottom of the window with "AME" above it was painted "MAGA", so I concluded that this signified that the stall was selling American magazines. But obviously a scene at a British station.

(No jokes needed about this being an early manifestation of Trump's MAGA, please!)

 
Spoiler alert - GWR are 3rd (best).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/03afefd47a47c335

 
9 The little museum in Corfe Castle’s West Street

 
Ten years since First Great Western rebranded ro Great Western Railway

It really hasn't felt so great of late ... cancellation rates up through the roof, with a service that's been so unreliable that it's been too risky to promote to new users.

 

I have just commented on my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/graham.ellis.melksham/ - an unusually policitical comment for me:


We do have a by-election coming up at a much lower level (Town Council, South Ward, which I used to represent) next month and there are just two declared candidates - one representing the Conservatives, and the other Reform.  As a voter in the ward, I am really interested to learn from both candidates what they would offer as one of my councillors. On that, I wrote:

 
Looks like Danny Kruger MP, has moved from Conservative to Reform.

When the Melksham and Devizes constituency was added, he moved his area southwards to East Wiltshire, having lost the Devizes part.

Not sure what others think of local MPs switching parties.