...but can't see a corresponding (direct) return trip for the commute back...

 
Ah yes - 07:00 Oxford - 08:20 Bristol direct via Swindon, Chippenham & Bath (no Keynsham).

 
From Oxford? In which case, a 5car IET

 
Just spotted that from Mon Jun 1 the official 07:21 Melksham - Bristol option is scheduled to arrive at 08:20; it's currently 08:39. As you say, it looks like they're squeezing a new 07:47 service from Chippenham between the existing 07:33 (unofficial connection, risky) and the 08:09 (official, safe due to long gap). Woohoo!

I think it's originating from Swindon; pretty sure it's not from Paddington anyway. So I guess it's not an IET?

 
Thanks Mark. Looking forward to reading that, although probably not on the train - the way it's presented doesn't appear to encourage reading on a phone

 
Ah, this may be a link to the Melksham book.

Mark


https://images.wbct.org.uk/index.php?%2Fcategory%2F4494

 
Outstanding quality of the trip: end-to-end in safety and without adding to the traffic on big city roads or the pressure on parking.

Even Portishead and back the other Monday involved the bus picking its way past a four vehicle suburban road traffic collision. Not sure how they managed it but police and ambulance in attendence, vehicle occupants in various states of disarray on the pavement and a chap with a breakdown truck already winching the first vehicle onto the ramp. With difficulty as one of its front wheels was pointing at 90 degrees to the direction it should have been.

On to the train at Bristol and off three and a half hours later at Leeds was a pleasant change.

Mark

 
The author takes a position, certainly. A major issue with public transport is the people who would never use it. (And the following issue would be that if they did, they'd promptly swamp the system, and there'd hopefully be an outcry for the enhancements on which she's touched and that Melksham needs)

Mark

 
April 2026, and the through service Bradford** and Trowbridge to Waterloo gets a mention as it's a renewed aspiration. [Edit: the strapline beneath the photo isn't particularly useful]

Mark

https://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/26048069.boost-plans-build-three-wiltshire-railway-stations/

** That's Bradford-on-Avon, not Bradford, Yorkshire of course. Next, someone will propose the introduction of a train service between Waterloo and Manchester, which would be silly.***

*** Not silly, as that service, the butt of jokes from newspaper hacks, provided a whole shopping-basket-full of interregional travel opportunities that grew railway business and in the case of Bristol to Hereford, loaded embarrassingly well.

 
Is there a rather huge dollop of irony in that article, or is just genuinely awful!

 

 

It was very much a crossover time.  Like with the entertainment carriage on Class 180s the spec was designed in the latter part of the last century when to listen to music on the move you basically took your Discman, complete with 3.5mm headphone jack socket.  Portable MP3 players were just starting to be introduced, but were very niche until the iPod came along in 2001, and it was of course long before smart phones were around.

Also, reservation displays were a very new thing.  Were the Voyager fleet the first?  And that has quickly been refined into much better displays with the excellent IET/Azuma 'traffic light' system the most fundemental change.  It will be a shame if XC haven't upgraded them with some of those developments, even if their less-than-ideal positioning would be tricky to change due to the carriage design.

{Quote altered to remove the 'Mark' - we can see it's you!}

 
Returning through Bristol on Saturday, and alongside a platform there, a refreshed set. I didn't have the chance to look at the interior, and Geoff Marshall's video from the launch event involves a train with temporary lighting in the carriages.

There's a rumour that the reservations displays haven't been renewed, but that cannot be the case as the originals have pretty well faded into obscurity in the way that those magic eye valves from 1950's radios did. OK that was a long time back but, looking it up, I was surprised to read that the Voyagers were introduced as late as 2001 - something that makes the built in and fragrant little headphone sockets even more surprising, but I suppose that that idea was being borrowed from aviation. (The 3.5mm jack socket and plug has been around from the 1950s I read, so it does thoroughly overlap with the mainstream existence of the magic eye indicator valves that the designers didn't specify for the Voyager seat reservation displays...)

Mark

 
Have gotten used to it not being there already, second nature now for the detour

 
Bath to Portishead, from Somerset Live, a first hand account with images. Roaring support for an alternative to what's available today.

Mark

https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/gallery/journey-portishead-showed-railway-line-10934144

 
Melksham News - 23rd April 2026

 
Outstanding announcement of the trip: after Birmingham: forceful advice not to put bags on unoccupied seats: the train manager would be coming through the train and would be charging the owners of any luggage occupying seats a single fare for it.

Outstanding passenger of the trip: the two year old who quickly went to sleep on the (unoccupied and spare) seat beside her parent and quietly snored like a little hedgehog for an hour or so.

Mark

 
Crosscountry Trains food, drink, and on-train experience. if I were Crosscountry I'd be considering withdrawing catering completely so everyone knows where they stand - the current offering isn't planned, resourced or operated in a way that can deliver and it must be frustrating for the people working on the trains let alone the passengers. It's shot through with baked-in poor practice.

(Thursday's 9:30 from Bristol started well with coffee/tea & biscuits before Parkway - anything else on offer was a closely guarded secret). After Worcestershire Parkway the carriage alarm made a series of coded 'Bongs' after which the temperature in the carriage slowly fell away to 'Chilly'. (Thursday morning was bright, hazy and cold.) An enquiry about food from one of the other passengers produced the sight of sandwiches and then a small avalanche of orders, after which there was an announcement that the catering had closed to prepare for a crew change at Birmingham, after which they didn't re-appear for the rest of the leg to Leeds. (The train was heading off to Edinburgh).

Saturday's 14:15 from Leeds. After an hour the staff with the standard class trolley took it straight through coach A into standard. Shortly before that, one of the passengers who was travelling with an infant had gone to the front and dug a cup of tea out of him but she was the only person in first class who landed anything until much later. Somewhere before Cheltenham I think it was, there was an announcement that staff couldn't bring the trolley through the train but if passengers made their way to the front of coach 'F' he'd serve them there. I did just that and carried a couple of cups of tea the length of the train back to 'A' - the chap staffing the trolley asked how many people were in carriage 'A'. (It wasn't clear why the trolley couldn't be brought through the train - while it was full in standard, the gangways were clear. Coach A had just four unoccupied seats). Around Cam and Dursley, the trolley chap made his way to coach A and served people there, which made for the third time this trip that I heard the silly crisps conversation.

So, yes, catering. Have a think about it, eh, Crosscountry?

Mark

 
Ticketing: Bath to Bristol on anytime returns. Leeds to Bradford on advance purchase singles (one train only but the train manager was intensely relaxed that we were on the one after, having arrived slightly late into Leeds) and then Bradford to Leeds on day singles.

The Crosscountry leg was more entertaining as I'd not used the Seatfrog app for ages, bought two pairs of advance purchase singles from them, total cost £92 and then a pair of upgrades. Printed the upgrades onto a sheet of A4 as a backup but didn't realise that those don't include the original tickets as well. The seatfrog app of its own accord later decided that it would only show the original tickets when a train manager wasn't in the carriage which led to a bit of... discussion... on both the outward and return trips. More on that when I hear back from the Seatfrog support people, but meanwhile I found the secondary way to ask the app to display tickets and that worked 100%.

Ticketing more generally: multiple tickets on one mobile phone isn't ideal at busy gatelines but it can now be current practice. The next step down is phone-wafting and that can take time depending on whether a visible code is being read or there's a transaction using NFC. Paper printed codes seem to be read quicker by gateline readers. Card tickets with a stripe feel to be the quickest and most fluid. Capping all of this is the number of people who walk right up to the gate line, block it and then start looking for their ticket. While I am an expert at misplacing any travel ticket, I'm not sure what's going on there, in some stations you almost need a training area or something, or perhaps the railways could build a tidy little online resource for this.

Is this perhaps an extension of the thing one sees on buses - the passenger who boards and despite having used buses frequently is suddenly utterly floored by the need to go through some sort of ticket transaction?

Mark

 
The Coffee Shop has 350 posts in 71 threads with cancellations, short formations or short runs reported "this is due to more trains than usual needing repairs at the same time".  So far this month alone, there are reports on five threads here each dealing with a different line.

My language-pedant mode (comes from many years of programming) suggests that an even notable enough to report 350 times is not "usual" and I wonder if we are short of trains, failing on repair time taken so they stay out of service longer, or running in a system with an interent shortage not designed to cope in total with the normal peaks and troughs of demand.

The modern information age is a nightmare for the train operator; we know about these things from far and wide, not just when the train fails to turn up, or turns up short - which is sometimes only a techical issue anyway as an comfortable 5 carriage trains in off peak is just as good as a sparse 9 coach train, some might argue better as the trolley can get through better, the energy use is lower, timekeeping better as it spends shorter times over speed restrictions, etc

We also have train specialisation.  It may be boring to always have - say - class 150 trains on the Gunnislake line.  But at least it means that they can be taken from a wider pool if there are lots the same, and the irritating "we don't have a train / locomotive of the right type ..." situations would be less.  Interoperations and intercoupling ability seems to have fallen too - even in emergency use.  And it gets worse.  Looking at trains into Paignton - could be (165/166), (150/158), (800/802), (220/221). Not sure if class 175 ventures down there.   Then you have the more unusual - specials with class 47, 50, 98 and others on the front (and/or read) , and Midland Pullman and others wedged between class 43 locos.   

20 years ago, First took over Wessex trains and we were promised some interoperability and it HAS happened - station calls - routinely - at Keynsham in the peak with long distance expresses, and recently in very short term changes at Melksham too. On the Stroud Valley we have a mixture (though with VT0 lost, not as much of a mixture of services as would be welcome).   And we have lost the ability to have a local train that runs routinely from London to Newbury or Didcot carry on to Bedwyn  or Oxford.   What should the next generation be?  Common coupling?  To an old standard that reduces development but aids recovery?  To another new standard which adds yet another layer of complexity and options?   Should every piece of motive power - whether built in to a carriage (DMU / EMU / DEMU) have a fallback coupling / multiple operation capability - so if an IET is stuck behind a failed freight it can give it a shove?

 
From Facebook

 
An update, from the BBC:

 
From the BBC:

 
From the BBC: