Quite. And indeed the Tories could actually get political mileage out of an "evil unions" stance at the by-elections

This is the central issue ad as a result there is no “maybe after” in the equation.

I felt something of a line voice at the time of privatisation because I thought it would be a good thing, finally getting the government out of the railways hair.

How wrong I was. We have seen 20 years of government meddling in micro-management, and things are only set, at best, to remain the same in the foreseeable future.

Those who have supported renationalisation through some naive belief that it will bring ticket price reductions will find out the truth the hard way, as will those who have smirked and said “Well it couldn’t be any worse, could it?”

I didn’t make many friends on this forum earlier this year when, after coming back from South Africa and finding out what happened to the Bristol to Waterloo service, took a view based on this being purely a TOC^▸ (Train Operating Company) business decision. But then we lost the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) Brighton services, and then I read about services in West Wales; more truncation of through services and poor connections in their place.

A pattern is emerging; those lines where another operator runs occasional services are having those services withdrawn. This may have a positive effect in reducing revenue sharing (although I don’t know if this has any significance under the current regime). But it also has significant disadvantages both to longer distance passengers and also on route knowledge. Once that route knowledge is lost I do not see retention or regaining that knowledge as a matter uppermost in the minds of those in control of GBR.

So you can bark at the culprits if you like, but bearing in mind who you are barking at I doubt it will make much difference.

The only thing that really gets through to these people is a lack of votes in Ballot boxes. So if you happen to live in Wakefield or Tiverton and Honiton....

The good news is that the two bus stops at the Northey Arms at Box are virtually opposite each other across the main A4, so in theory the minimum connection time should be the time it takes you to cross the road

The othe good news is that Faresaver, the operator of both bus services, has sent a car for me before now when one of their services has gone AWOL^▸ (Absent Without Leave). In ither cases they have agreed to pay for a taxi

The bad news is that at that time of day/ night their one office based member of staff on duty would be on a mobile phone and not in the office. I suspect that if you could convince him/her that the company were in some way to blame foryour missed conection, they would tell you to get yourself a taxi and send them the bill

This is of course my take on the situation based on p-ast experience and not necessarily what would definitely happen on the day! 

There is a difference of course between what you can theoretically do and what it is reasonable or sensible to do. If somebody was absolutely determined to go from Chippenham to Melksham by bus on a Sunday, here are their options:

Chippenham 1000   1130   1300   1430   1600   1720   1840
Box Northey 1044   1214   1344   1514   1644   1800   1920

Box Northey 1127   1327   1527     1727      1927
Melksham Mkt 1150   1350        1550             1750      1950
                     
Melksham Mkt 0938   1138   1338   1538   1738      
Box Northey a 1000   1200   1400   1600   1800      

Box Northey d   1012 1312   1442   1612   1845      
Chippenham   1058 1358   1528   1688   1923      

Shall we just say that some of those connections coulo be improved...

The other thing to mention about Wiltshire's bus services is when they run

There is a reasonable service during the working day, but after 7pm on weekdays, all day on Sundays and Bank Holidays, the only places you can go by bus from Chippenham are a half-hourly service to Swindon via Calne and Wootton Bassett, and a 90-minute interval subsidised service to Bath via Corham and Box. None of the other routes run on these days

I would say that sort of journey and timings is fairly typical for a lot of Wiltshire and other semi-rural areas, having a lot of small and reasonably-sized market towns with many fields in between!

And there are many people worse off than that. There is, for example, no direct bus service between Malmesbury and Cricklade, or Cricklade and Wootton Bassett. In both cases a change has to be made at Swindon, doubling the mileage and of course the theoretical direct fare

Even worse I can think of many a few places in Wiltshire that are 5 miles from the nearest bus stop, and many more where the nearest stop is two or more miles away. And even after someone has walked all that way, there is no guarantee that the bus they find there will take them where they actually want to go.

And these are some of the reasons why it is so unwise to advocate blanket policies such as banning cars in towns or fuel price escalators to deal with issues such as pollution or climate change. If you happen to live on a large urban area where public transport is frequent plentiful, please keep in mind those who0 are not so fortunate.

Well I certainly didn't read that into it

For the last few days the news has been full of the story that, following large numbers of lay-offs during the pandemic, the airline industry is having major problems in refilling those posts again. This is hardly surprising given that they are generally all lowly-paid with unsocial hours and many of the former emlyees would have found more attractive ways of scraping a living

I also heard this evening that the industry has been refused their request for temporary immigration visas to help overcome the problem

"Take back control" is sounding increasingly hollow as  time progresses....

What I don’t understand about this is that if the blockage is at Craven Arms, why are no trains running north of Hereford so leaving Leominster and Ludlow not served

1941 was what my ex-father in law told me and its too late to ask him now because he died in 1990. He lived in Bath right through the war and they certainly got a lot of "visits from across the Channel"

We can be reassured that it is not as bad as last time when the whole lot came down

This was in connection with the redesigning of Bath city centre by the Luftwaffe in 1941...

I just came back to the forum to give my views and I see I’ve been beaten to it!

My only change to 81Ds suggestion is that I think the fact that animals have been killed adds emphasis to the severity and possible longevity of the situation, and that should appear in sentence/ paragraph 2

Yes they did. Fourth sentence/ paragraph down. I wonder how many passengers had stopped reasing before then!

At least I can claim mitigation because of my bloody glaucoma...

Thanks for this - it makes what is going on far more understandable

But of course the general public are apparently only being told that there are "animals on he line" and, like me initially, may think of it as a reltively trivial matter that should not take very long to sort out. Many of them are not going to enquire into the details, they will simply see what the departure boards are telling them.

It would be better for railway PR^▸ (Public Relations) if they actually made clear the full extent of the problem

The first train to be cancelled was the 0523 from Weymouth,so clearly the aimals must have been on the line before then.

It is now 1200 and still nothing has run south of Yeovil

Just exactly how long does it take to move animals off the line these days? Are they trying to put hi-viz jackets on 'em all first???

I suspect that the majority of the general public, rather than the likes of us, won’t “enquire,” they vote with their feet

If the railways wanted to lose trade, this would be by a very good way to go about it

Increasing fares whilst not calling a fares increase a fares increase is hardly likely to increase repeat business. People will see through this newspeak quite easily and the media would have a field day with it, thereby reducing new passenger numbers still further.

Another good way to lose trade is to have frequent short-notice cancellations. There is a thread running at the moment about the south-west bound semi-fasts being chopped due to staff shortages but there is another example far closer to home that affects Graham much more than me. That is the level of cancellations on the Westbury to Swindon service, which has often found an entire crew shift’s worth of trains cancelled. It is starting to amaze me that there are still people using Melksham station at all.

Trains booked as 9 or 10 car running with 5; what passes for a catering service cancelled because nobody can be found who has been trained to wheel a trolley backwards; the list of things that look like they are actually designed to push passenger numbers down is a long one.

Nobody in senior management seems in the slightest inclined to sort out these problems.

There are some on this forum who feel that the government is still as anti-rail as it was in Margaret Thatcher’s time. Personally I don’t believe they are right for a number if practical reasons including facts like building new roads has been seen as impractical for over 30 years, the existing road network struggles to cope with existing road traffic, and that the matter of climate change and pollution are not going to magically go away, and the government knows it. Nevertheless, apparently powerless senior railway management, possibly aided, abetted and/or instructed by the Treasury appear to be doing all they can to make these situations worse

Let’s be honest. If your local Sainsburys treated its customers with as much contempt as the railways are currently doing, the next time your cupboards were getting bare you’d be going to Asda or Morrison or Tesco for the next stock up