Great Western Coffee Shop

At the outbreak of Covid, our passenger traffic at Melksham was decimated as it was everywhere else, and walking through a train to see how many people were travelling was a no-no, not that there were many. But time passes and today I was on the 15:14 from Swindon (15:39 into Melksham) walked through on carriage and looked up the other between Chippenham and Melksham;  I noted quite a light load from Swindon to Chippenham, but then what felt like a flood of passengers joining.

Around 60 passengers on the train from Chippenham, 16 off ad 5 on at Melksham. So in the terms I used to use, that's 65/21  - 65 users of the train on the section that's unique to the TransWilts, of whom a third (21) were journeys to or from Melksham.

Delighted - better than I can ever recall for this train in the past; this one was our real "lemon" when new in 2014 and it took a long time to build up. Tweaking the time to make a connection to Warminster and Salisbury helped.  Amazing that there were more people per carriage than either of the two trains I was on to get me to Swindon; sure, they were longer ...