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From the Gazette and Herald (https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/news/18294313.talks-start-network-rail-second-station-swindon/)

Somewhat optimistic I fear. The ninth Exeter station would of course be Marsh Barton but there is currently no activity at the proposed location; last time I cycled past, about 10 days ago, the site was being used as a temporary gypsy camp.

Surely GWR wouldn't want to stop its London services at Royal Wootton Bassett, would they?  So that would only leave the TransWilts services, which unless it was made hourly would be a lot of expense building a station for a 2 hourly service.

I can remember approx 20 years ago?
could be less, could be more.
A meeting was held and approx a hundred turned up out of population of 10,000
Don't even get me going about the planned rail flyover at the same location.

Yes ... a station to the West of Swindon - say 5 to 10 miles out - has been on the WIBNIF (Wouldn't It Be Nice IF) list for a generation.   The loss of Wootton Bassett station in 1965 was, perhaps, one of the steps-too-far of the Beeching era; noting earlier comment, Wikipedia reports:

 

... with Wikipedia, of course, giving only a bit of the story.

A station on the original site has been scuppered by the lay-by which comes off the line from Bristol Parkway runs past the junction through where the original platform was, then rejoins the main line.  Sites to the west (on the Chippenham line), to the east of the junction where housing is build built and there is land owner interest, and near the motorway as a park and ride have been mentioned.

If the station is to be a commuter one for Swindon, it would fail on current frequency - and indeed the TransWilts needs stepping up to hourly anyway.  Even at hourly, a great Motorway Park and Ride for London perhaps - but you get into capacity issues on the track for any east of the junction stations.  Although there's no coal traffic any more, passenger service have been stepped up and the more so with the super fasts, and something stopping would eat up multiple paths.   I could write a lot more; interesting but complex project. 

Flyover?  Might do better to fly a track under.

P.S. With "supefasts", the now semi-fast may be in the balance to stopping. Of course, what you want is the hourly train from Salisbury AND an electric train from Bristol calling in each hour, the latter enabling Corsham and Saltford too.  I understand MPs James Gray and Michelle Donelan are supporting local requests for study and project development money.

Could a Swindon Parkway/Wootton* Bassett station be an extra point towards a revived Bristol to Oxford service?

*I always have to stop and ask myself how to spell this. I guess I'm more used to Wotton-under-Edge. What a wonderfully unpredictable language we have!

I think in an ideal world we'd see at least a half-hourly (electric) stopping service between Bristol and Swindon with new stations at Royal WB, Corsham, Saltford and St Annes (Bristol).

I think that it's reasonable to assume that the demand would be there to make it viable. Quite what you'd have to put in place in terms of infrastructure to make it viable is another question. At least another pair of platforms at Chippenham I would have thought. 

 

When I see a statement like that I do two things: Firstly wonder what the statement is based on (ie what evidence is there to back it up), and secondly to check the facts I have at my disposal to see if I can agree with it or otherwise.

In this case it is otherwise. My first source of evidence comes from the population figures in my 1957/58 AA Members Handbook (not mine because I was 5 at the time – I acquired it somehow over the years!)

In 1957/58 the population of Wootton Bassett is shown as 3419 (presumably this figure would have been based on 1951 census returns). The population of Melksham at the same time was 7060m so on the basis of population figures alone Wootton Bassett was twice as likely to “cop it” than Melksham. But Melksham closed too, which tends to undermine the assertion about Wootton Bassett.

In contrast, the population of Swindon was 71370 and Chippenham 15140. As a matter of curiosity I looked t the figures for Wotton under Edge also mentioned in his thread, and they were 3506, so slightly larger than Wootton Bassett, and nobody ever bothered to build a railway there, despite the fact it would have been a reasonably easy thing to do as a branch from Charfield. After all, Sharpness, Dursley and Stroud/ Nailsworth all got one courtesy of the Midland Railway.

On the basis of population figures that statement cannot be supported in the slightest.

At the time (early 1960s) nobody did any commuting outside of the major urban areas. Wootton Bassett had yet to become a dormitory town for Swindon or indeed anywhere else. It was a minor market town, little more than a large village, in North Wiltshire. Putting my Surveyor’s hat on (as I often have in Wootton Bassett!  ;D ), all of the northern and eastern areas in the town have been built since 1966, and I can be that precise because in my research into local authority housing provision in North Wiltshire many years ago I found out – it’s all in the Cricklade & Wootton Bassett RDC Council minutes now held at the Wiltshire History Centre in Chippemham if anybody wants to check!)

Wootton Bassett station, like Saltford, also suffered from the fact that it was at the bottom of a hill from the place it purported to serve. In the days when most people didn’t have a car (ie when the Beeching traffic surveys were being carried out in April 1961), this was a major disincentive to rail usage. The issue also saw off Okehampton and Ilfracombe but for the opposite reason. Traffic was so thin that Swindon Corporation buses never went out there (well they wouldn’t of course because they were outside of their boundary) and the Bristol company provided a 2-hourly service between Malmesbury and Swindon that didn’t even go into the town (serving only what is now the Coped Hall roundabout), and an alternating approximately 2-hourly service from Swindon to Calne and Chippenham, so only an approximate hourly service that actually went down the High Street.

This was not the sort of traffic potential that the railway wanted or needed in the 1960s and, even if they did, what was going to stop there? The station was lumped together for closure with the other intermediate stations between Bath and Swindon. And the railway was certainly not going to stop the Londons there even without the problem of short platforms – they had enough “drawing up” to do on the old down main platform at Chippenham  ;D

It is very easy to look at what is now the case in terms of traffic porential and blithely assume that that potential has always been there. In so may cases, as indeed at Wootton Bassett, it has not.

Beeching was not given a crystal ball - he was dealing with how things were at the time...

No but in some places the plans were already made for expansion and Dr Beeching didn't need a crystal ball to find those. 

We can (and indeed are) arguing about how much foresight there was or wasn't at the time of Dr Beeching.

It has been said that his cuts were, perhaps, twice as deep as they should have been and that lead me to take a look at Swindon to Bristol and quantify. 

1 Swindon
3 Hay Lane
2 Wootton Bassett Juntion
2 Dauntsey
2 Christian Malford
1 Chippenham
2 Corsham
2 Box (Mill Lane)
2 Box
2 Bathford
2 Bathampton
3 Hampton Row
1 Bath Spa
1 Oldfield Park
3 Twerton-on-Avon
2 Saltford
1 Keynsham
2 St Annes Park
1 Bristol Temple Meads

Stations marked "1" have survived (6 of them).   Stations marked "3" were long gone even by the 1960s (3 of them).  Stations marked "2" were closed within my lifetime, and there are 10 of them.

There are / were, in essence, two different hurdles for a station to remain open / exist at all. The first hurdle was for a passenger railway to be open and running through that station, and that had to be jumped before even the question of whether a station at the particular place was to remain in existence.   With so many lines closing, and all the stations on them going, it follows that "going twice as far as it should" in relation to stations on remaining lines probably should read as "going more than twice as far as it should".  I can look at the list above and split the list of "2" stations into 3 groups - stations which should never have gone, questionable cases, and stations for which there was no future.  Royal Wootton Bassett - Wootton Bassett Junction as it was in those days - strikes me as a far better case to have kept than certain others!

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We are, however, looking at current times and lively discussions as to whether The Doctor got it right should fade to an academic interest rather than providers of quantified numbers into a discussion of what's needed for the next 20 or 40 years.

Swindon - Royal Wootton Bassett - Chippenham - Corsham - [Box/Batheaston/Bathampton] - Bath Spa - Oldfield Park - Saltford - Keynsham - St Annes - Temple Meads, every half hour, strikes me as a sensible staring target for discussions. Stations not currently open might be on old sites or new ones, further study needed. I could give you a traffic type / flow thought for each of the additions and some might surprise you.

I know there was a signal box at Hay Lane, but I was not aware that there was ever a station there.  It is now well positioned on the edge of West Swindon, near to the proposed new western part of the new Wichelstowe development and next to Jn 16 of the M4, but before 1970 it would only have been near a few scattered farms. 

I agree wholeheartedly with that, but you made reference to the wisdom of closing Wootton Bassett in the first place. That was what I was responding to, not whether or not those considerations still apply today


He didn’t need a crystal ball to see the parlous state railway finances were in either, or in which direction they were going.

I came across a graph some years ago (I’ve just looked for it on Google and can’t find it this morning) which shows that passenger numbers were not only in a continuous decline from the 1920s, but they also continued to fall until a low point c1982. In a society that was becoming increasingly car-focused in the 1960s, it made precious little difference whether any new developments were planned or not because perceived wisdom at the time was they were all going to be using their cars anyway, rather than buses and trains.


As I have said before on many occasions, blame Beeching and indeed the governments of the day for what they got wrong at the time, not what it now appears they got wrong with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight 30+ years later

A slightly more updated version of the graph is here, showing the continued dramatic growth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britain#/media/File:GBR_rail_passengers_by_year_1830-2015.png

Has anyone ever seen an equivalent graph of goods traffic for the whole of railway history? I went looking for one, and could only find one from the start to around 1900, and another from 1983 on. Between those two dates the gross tonnage shifted fell from over 500M tons to about 150M tons. As so much of that latterly was coal and other bulk commodities, I'm sure revenue fell by a lot more. It was the small loads (wagonload, part-load and parcels) that pretty much vanished due to the influx of lorries after WW1.

Probably some avid researcher or three has done a book on it.

Post was being sent by train till the late 1980s, wasn't it? I don't suppose that was a huge tonnage but it might have accounted for a bit more revenue.

If I recall correctly the postal trains ran well into the  current century. I am pretty certain that there were still Post Office trains at Platform 9 at Reading when I started commuting by train again in 2001. This was also the platform where locomotives ran around their trains on the south coast to the Midlands and north trains that became (or had just become) Cross Country trains.  How on earth did they fit them all into the old station?

Just checked on Wikipedia- they ran until January 2004.

End of thread drift.....

They may well have, and the decline certainly started after WW! when the War Ministry were selling off surplus equipment, and so many men had learned to drive during that war.

In essence, Beeching threw in the final towel on wagonloas traffic when it became clear that it was costing far more to move the remnants of it than the railways got in the rates they received for carrying it.

If I remember the history books correctly, it had a brief existence as a terminal station when the GWR was being built westwards from Swindon. It didn't survive after the onward extension to Wootton Bassett and beyond.

Adam Crozier was in charge of Royal Mail  from 2003 to 2010 when profits increased dramatically.