Great Western Coffee Shop

(http://www.savethetrain.org.uk/melksham_station_1985.jpg)

Melksham Station closed in 1966, and re-opened on 13th May 1985 - 38 years ago today.  For most of the early years, there were two trains a day during the week - to Swindon in the morning and back in the late afternoon, with a number of short-lived experimental extras.

From 2013, a train was allocated to the line all day and run up and down, giving a service about every 2 hours. At first, it was a single carriage train but that got so busy it could not cope. These days the train is two or three carriages long, and it needs to be.  Our line is no longer the "lemon" of GWR and the flow of passengers to and from the station for almost every train is a sight for the sore eyes of those of us who have promoted it for many years.  At the same time, the service remains sparse / poor.  A huge THANK YOU is due to the people who have helped us get this far, but it's still very much a project in progress ...

We have moved up from 2 trains each way per day to 8, and in passenger journeys to / from Melksham from around 3,000 per annum to around 75,000 - but that's 75,000 journeys where people have to make a significant adjustment to their travel plans to co-inside with a train.  Move the frequency to a train each way every hour, so that there's always a train within 30 minutes of your ideal travel time, and passenger journeys will grow in three years to over 300,000 per annum. Add to that through journeys from Westbury and Trowbridge to Chippenham and Swindon (Melksham has the benefit of sharing its trains with those other towns), and you've got around a million journeys a year, and a service key to the economic life of the whole area.  With added freight traffic, there is no longer reliable capacity on the line for this extra service, and with the long single line section, it would require a step up from one train shuttling up and down to three, with a layover in Swindon (or a useful extension to Oxford with a fourth train) for it to work, or the addition of a loop of double track to the north of Melksham Station.

From 21st May (2023), we have some service changes. A significant extra new service in the late evening is added - 21:15 from Westbury and 22:30 from Swindon - meaning that for the first time in many years, Melksham will have an almost "all day, every day" service.  That service runs every day in the summer, but sadly not - yet - on Saturdays in winter.  Daytime Saturday and Sunday services are evened out; slightly fewer trains but that should aid reliability.  We loose the early morning train (at 05:33) to Swindon, but since it was introduced in 2019 that's really been more run to get an empty train up to Swindon that to be a mass transit conveyance.

New timetable sheet available for download at http://www.mtug.org.uk/summer23sheet1.pdf

The early work to re-open the station and then support keeping it open and was undertaken by the Melksham Railway Development Group (MRDG) - predecessor of the Melksham Transport User Group, aided by the Save the Train campaign for a number of years from 2005. As that campaign bore fruit, we formed the TransWilts Community Rail partnership to work with local government, central government and the train operating companies to regain and retain an appropriate service.  I am proud to have been a founder of "TransWilts" and their Community Rail Officer for the period up to the summer of 2018 as we regained the service and grew it until we had full (and over-full) single carriage trains.

Over the last five years since my departure, TransWilts has moved on from being a local support group to being an organisation accredited to the Department for Transport and concerned with future rail development across Wiltshire, and with engaging with groups in the community who need extra support when interfacing with the railway. Both excellent pieces of work, but in my view leaving a gap in day to day promotion and supporting passenger use, and loosing the independence that they used to enjoy; I was given the choice of staying in my Community Rail Officer role (as in effect a civil servant), or retaining the independence to express my views and act as the passenger community wanted. And I chose to retain my independence.  In practise, that's usually in line with the Department for Transport - though I noted without surprise that when the Department for Transport decided to cull the popular through trains from Bradford-on-Avon and Trowbridge to London, TransWilts was unique amongst local and regional passenger and community groups we approached in not even offering words of support.

The current chair (who moved me on) has done a very great deal of excellent longer term planning and engagement, setting up reports and potential schemes - getting them on the table - for the future. He retires this month - THANK YOU for all your hard work, Paul. Perhaps we can look forward to new stations at Wilton, Corsham and Devizes from his legacy over coming years, and an extra platform at Westbury and a passing loop near Beanacre to help as we move from the current poor service at Melksham up to the appropriate one I describe above, with four times the passenger numbers on two times the number of trains.

We have other work to do in Melksham. 

* It was pointless running a bus to the station prior to 2013.  But in 2023, a town bus dropping people off at the station prior to each train call, then carrying people back to the Town Centre, residential areas to the East of Melksham, and business areas of Bowerhill, makes sense. The temporary "rail link bus" while the car park was extended in 2014 rapidly grew, but wasn't properly funded and council priorities moved what little funding was available.

* TransWilts are seeking a new chair - I have copied the advert and linked to the job description at http://www.passenger.chat/27474 . It is unclear to me whether this is just a "form" advert and they already have a successor in mind, or a genuine casting out for a successor looking for an outsider to come in and guide them forward.  I have taken a look and won't be applying - although I believe I'm much better qualified than most, there is no way I could achieve all that's asked of their new lead in the 7 to 10 hours per month that has been specified, nor would I be happy to be a puppet of local and central government.

* The station remains unstaffed. Not an issue for regular users, but for occasional users and enquirers, and at times that the service is not running "clockwork", this would make a huge difference. The cafe across the road from the station opened at a very unfortunate time early in covid and has never really taken off for the benefit of rail passengers; it closes this month.  As a volunteer staffed enquiry desk, with simple and quick catering (drinks, packeted cakes and biscuits) in could make a huge difference.

* Access to the station is limited to Station Approach. Plans that have been in the offing for YEARS need to be brought to fruition to provide a walkway and cycleway via Foundry Close allowing shorter, safer and more pleasant "green" connection both to north Melksham, and across the river via Scotland Road to the whole of Melksham Forest.  Re-instatement of the steps to the Bath Road would substantiality reduce the walk to Scholar's Way, Southbrook Road, and the new up yard development which has gone through planning and will bring 112 new home close to the station.