Sharing my Facebook post ...

A very happy Christmas from the TransWilts team to everyone who's used public transport services to, from and within Wiltshire this year, and to everyone who may be making use of it next year too.

Five years ago, the train service on our backbone route from Swindon and Chippenham via Melksham to Trowbridge and Westbury with extentions to Warminster and Salisbury was so poor that it was useless.  Miss the 06:12, and your next train would be at 18:44.  We moved for 2014 from a useless service to a trail service - usable, but still very sparse indeed - notable gaps including (and include to this day) between 07:49 and 10:04 northbound (Melksham times) and 06:46 to 09:33 (Trowbridge arrival times).  For an evening out, the service remains absent - last train home at 18:38 on Saturdays (from Trowbridge) is absurd. 

I have personally been involved in helping promote the current service - and it's good to see the drought we had a few years back turned into a trickle, and the trains now carrying a health payload of passengers (or at times so many passengers crammed in that they're more than a health payload) rather than fresh air. Chatting with a new traveller I met at Melksham station the other day, though, he commented on how poor both the station environment and the train service frequency is - he was shocked by the very long waits between services, by the industrial look of the station area, and by the low number of passengers when you consider just how big a population the station serves.  I told him how right he was, before admitting to being one of the people who's been involved in getting it to where it is this year.  TransWilts is very much work in progress.

In the first few days of next year, passengers will start to notice an extra carriage on most trains - no more one carriage trains, and until the extra carriages fill everyone should be able to get a seat.  Gently, services will be improved; the new year timetable moves several trains be a few minutes to help make connections more robust, and an addition Sunday morning train from Warminster heads north over two hours earlier than the current 10:49 - there's engineering works for the first few weekends, but then the new service settles down as an 08:47 to Bath and Bristol. A couple of anacronisms in the fare structure will be cleared in the New Year too.  And you may see other little changes that will make a big difference during the year too.

Come January 2019, timetables change all across the south west as both SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) and GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) reschedule their main lines.  And this offers an opportunity for regional lines such as the TransWilts to be updated to take advantage of new opportunities, and to re-diagram trains to make them better used.  The current service from Swindon to Westbury was introduced in 2014 as a trial, and as such was not properly integrated; to have integrated it would have meant it would have been impractical for it to be withdrawn again painlessly without damaging other lines should the trial have failed. Now that there's no question of the trial failing, the Swindon to Westbury service can be integrated with services onwards via Warminster to Salisbury, and indeed on from there to the Southampton area.   Planning and contractual issues arise as two competing train companies need to co-operate for the common good without falling foul of competition law; we need to work for common sense to prevail as this would be a winner for everyone.

The TransWilts line has been growing faster than any other (and so it should, considering how awful it was five years ago) and the question arises "how far can that growth continue?".  We do expect less growth in the current financial year as train capacity has failed to keep up with demand, and there have been reliability problems over the last six months.  Fixes coming through in the New Year to both issues, and growth will resume.  Passenger numbers at Melksham Station have risen from around 3,000 journeys per annum at the start of the decade to 75,000 in the figures to April 2017, and forecasts suggests that with suitable services and station provision, that will keep rising.  I would not be surprised to see over 200,000 journeys a decade from now; official forecasts based on zero service improvements suggest that at current service levels we'll top out at 100,000 ... with very moderate improvements, their models suggest  we'll hit 130,000 in five years.  The "zero improvement" case is academic as we are promised 2 car trains 10 days from now; the 130k case includes the 2 car trains and 2 additional trips per day - but that's also academic with 2019 re-schedules.  So - whence the future?

1. Great Western and Community Rail public consultations are underway looking ten years ahead.  Although they are not TransWilts specific, the outcomes will form an important framework in which the TransWilts line, and other Wiltshire rail (and perhaps linked bus services) will fit.

2. A specialist capacity study is under way looking at future traffic requirements and how that can and should be accommodated - discussions took park looking at initial suggestions from the study last Thursday, and I'll be making some minor tuning changes (no more than a couple of minutes shift) to the 2019 suggestions to ensure that they're a natural and compatible step along the way.

3. The masterplan work for Melksham Station also proceeds - how that station's facilities (which were adequate when there were 3,000 journeys per year) can be improved to handle 200,000 safely, efficiently, and with the facilities people want.

Looking ahead at what YOU want for the next 10 years is a key January activity.  A note for your diary - Sunday, 7th January.  The Great Western Coffee Shop is holding a passenger meetup to help you formulate your best response to the consultations (and to help inform the Coffee Shop team too) http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=19134.0 . All welcome.  Other publicity and activities later in January to follow!

Have a great Christmas everyone ... trains and buses resume on 27th December and we look forward to seeing you on 2018's longer and more modern trains! And thank you for your 2017 support.

Latest addition to my GW^▸ (Great Western) terminating stations - London Marylebone, which I have dragged in from the Fastnet Rock to a couple of pixels to the right of and above Paddington!

We may have done, Chris ... such is the volume of stuff happening and the busyness of the forum that things end up getting repeated.   Chris from Nailsea does an excellent lead job of joining threads up so they form a building reference later (we really appreciate that Chris), but it's the nature of breaking news that the same data may fly in from several angles at once.

I'm a tutor (in IT) in my day job. And one of the tips I learned, from a cynic, was to repeat myself.  "Tell they what you're going to tell them.  Tell them.  Tell them what you've told them. And they may remember it".   Now I don't hold fully with that, though there's an element of truth; there is certainly a need for a pulling together of individual threads into a total picture ("summarising and adding context").    And  I do wonder how anyone can see the full flow of posts here and elsewhere and take it all in ... so a moderate repetition of key items does (IMHO^▸ (in my humble opinion)) more good than harm.


Repeating and highlighting certainly helps bring home key information - thank you for the highlight  

I understand that one of these is being delivered over Christmas and the New Year:


It comes in the form of class 166 units which have already started to move down - enough for five or six diagrams from the start of service on 2nd January, with drivers and train managers who have been substantially away on training also returning from that training to drive the new services, allowing stock released to lengthen the remaining one car "multiple" unit (!) trains in the area, and indeed providing something of an oversupply allowing 150/1 trains to be released to go "up north".

It does all still depend on some works being completed over the next 8 days, sign-offs to allow electric trains to run between Maidenhead and Didcot (otherwise - watch the panic transfer back of the 166s!).  And of course, being "railway", it does require paperwork and certification of the magic wand in time.   Should that not happen, I expect we would see a storm of complaints about the overrun like we've never seen before!

Bids were due in by last Thursday ... though according to Wales Online we don't actually know what was being bid for.


[snip]


[snip]

Yes, it is ... one of those locations where just a few pixels of border around the train central to the picture tell those of us familiar with the place exactly where it was taken.   Swindon, platform 2.

The attire of the individual who appears in the photo may lead you to think the picture was taken at Rovaniemi - but that station looks rather different:



This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license - Phil Richards from London, Sr1 3022 with IC710 waiting a late start on 11 July 2016 - train IC710, 15:20 Rovaniemi to Oulu.

On Christmas Eve ...

Suitably explained in the text I quoted, save that there was no indication what the other event was, so the list could have been needed for vetting for terrorists, sex offenders, or political opponents looking to sneak in via RailFuture and heckle at a rally.

The requirement came to us from RailFuture, but I do agree that it wasn't RailFuture itself, but rather the organisation from whom it contracted venue supply and hire, who made it a condition of the booking.  And rather like GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) have to take the immediate rap for NR^» (Network Rail - home page) failures when a train can't run, RailFuture do have to take responsibility for the terms and conditions imposed by their suppliers; if they don't like the terms and conditions, they have the option of going for another venue which (in practical terms) GWR can't do if they don't like something from Network Rail.

Very bad form to accept a booking under one set of Ts and Cs and impose another condition late in the day.

Very bad form (of a venue) to impose conditions set by one hirer onto another hirer.  Perhaps RailFuture should have asked for a "no under 12s " condition on the other event?


I noticed that;  all the attendees at the Railfuture event were escorted (not just directed) to an isolated enclave within the venue where we remained all day, and perhaps no names on the list had given any cause for concern so that check, together with the escorting through to and from our area, was considered sufficient.

I remain of the view that it would have been better to have chosen a venue in the first place where requirements of one event were going to be imposed on another parallel event, but I accept that the vetting list requirement was probably not made as clear as it should have been to the RailFuture team when their booking was accepted.

I can imagine a scenario where I want to travel from Chippenham to Swindon and back in the morning, attend a meeting at the offices at Monkton Park at lunchtime, and travel back up to and back from Swindon again in the afternoon.   Surely I could legitimately buy two return tickets to Swindon and produce only one railcard?

Yes - and how appropriate for Welshman to know that!

From The Courier - I suspect this is the "outcome program"


Good to see it in the evening that day - means you can all come along to our Forum / GW^▸ (Great Western) Franchise meet in Didcot that afternoon ... http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=19134.0

This week, the TransWilts line celebrated "Golden Tuesday".  It was Golden because all of our train actually ran - to the timetable pattern that's required by Great Western's contract with the Department for Transport.  On each of the other six days out of seven, some services were cancelled.

If "our" line had a frequent train service - a train to run every 30 minutes (so that's between 30 and 40 services each way per day), loss of a handful of services - providing they weren't directly after each other, wouldn't be a problem - people could just drop back to the following service.  But when the service is scheduled to be less than ten a day, it's a different matter. Loss of a single train often leads to a gap of four hours in the service, with people turning up in the middle of the gap for the cancelled train having to divert, wait, or be sent via alternative road transport.  That may not sound too bad - until you learn of long waits for alternative transport being provided (if at all), followed by much slower transit times.  And if anyone has a dog, or a cycle with them - tough luck; in a wheelchair and the provision of road transport is more certain, but the wait is likely to be longer.

As a long term advocate for the services on this line, where passenger numbers have rocketed in recent years, it's heartbreaking to see all the good work that's been done by our volunteers, by Great Western in the past, and by the team who operate the trains, squandered in a failure to provide enough people to operate the trains as timetabled. People can be very understanding if they're told "we have had to reduce the service for a week because a safety issue on the trains has come up and we can't run them" but they're less understanding if they're told "sorry - we haven't enough staff" when the contract for the service has been in place for a long time, and when cancellation rates like 15% (yes, that's what they're doing) seem unique to our line.  Grant you our cancellations aren't unique, but they are far the worst - and they have the worst effect on each individual because of the horrific service gaps they leave.

Explanations have been given as to why it's hard to staff our trains - and I know there's truth in the reasons.  But I also know that there's data left out from the reasons given which mitigate / dilute them. And I know that whilst it might be hard to organise the staff to operate the contract you've accepted, you're also carefully selected and well paid to do that hard job.

If, as the more optimistic voices suggest, things get rapidly better in the new year (longer and reliable trains), it'll be a huge sigh or relief for us all.  If they stay better for many years (bearing in mind these current problems are said to have their roots in the biggest modernisation program in a generation) then we'll be able to look back and celebrate how the hard times were overcome.

January and February see the conclusion of public consultation into the next 10 years of Community Rail, and into the next GW^▸ (Great Western) area rail franchise.   They offer an opportunity to suggest how community, rail industry, government, and other parties should all work together to help ensure that systems go forward for the wider mutual benefit - to help ensure that the current failure to supply the specified and contracted level of reliably is truly a once-in-a-generation failure.

Melksham Station has been consistently the fastest growing in the area in recent years. People are kind and thank us for our activities to make that happen, but in practise the dire, low starting point, the much improved schedule which was quite reliable until this spring, the crying needs of people in the area, and local and central government and industry support gave us a "can't fail" product that has sold iteslf.   However, I don't expect to see the same fast growth in the 2017-18 year.   The demand grows (and could grow more if we were to promote it), but the supply has run out.   Trains that people can't fit onto (or if they do once, they say "never again"), trains that don't run, service gaps which have needed filling as use grows but haven't been filled. I'm not saying "no growth" this year - the final outcome depends on the next three months - but it's certainly going to be stunted.  And I hope we can work forward so this stunting is only a one year blip.

And looking forward to the consultations - is there some way / some mechanism through which we can ask for a future framework that helps the operator meet their obligations - that gives us a strategic direction?   I'm not a great one for extra controls on TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) - but the TOC can't object if they've every intention of meeting their spec over coming years, and indeed having those extra elements there will help them pull the levels of their funding and specifying stakeholders where conditions external to them threaten their ability to deliver.

A further report - in Scots English - from The Herald Scotland

Having posted the question ... I supposed I should answer myself and nearly did last night.  Problem was there was so much going on around me that I couldn't concentrate to do more that read - and I only had one hand free.  To my far left, Lisa was playing Final Fantasy XIV on twin screens (one game view, one database views), volume up, and wearing an earpiece through which she was co-ordinating with Leah (our emergency technical admin here) and indeed talking back at times.  Across the room, the TV moved from Top of the Pops 2 (old disco hits) through to the harrowing situation in Myanmar - from relaxing to extremely unsettling.  Between us, on his back and head down the bed lay Billy (the greyhound), and he was occupying that hand that I mentioned to be unavailable earlier - grumbling if I stopped the gentle stroking of the parts of him that were within easy reach.  As well as the forum, various Facebook things were coming up on my screen including no fewer than three Facebook friends finding this Christmas season already starting hard.  One I suspect dumped, one feeling very lonely indeed after life changing choices which have taken over her whole life, and one who's partner has come back from a concert drunk and abusive and who needs to sort out a developing cycle she only just admitted during the evening.

This morning, it's a bit quieter.  I'm updating 2018 fare charts, preparing for 7th January Coffee Shop special event (my keynote speaker confirmed his availability yesterday evening!).   Incoming post includes a notice of auction of Railwayana in the New Year and a quick distraction to glance through reveals a Taplow totem (but in brown not green!) I expect will be of interest to one of our members - further look through in the evening I expect when the rest of the house is buzzing again.  Billy has appeared and been outside to drain - now waiting for breakfast on the dog cushion.   Gypsy - who was asleep at the bottom of the bed last night (snoring loudly) was up in the middle of the night but has yet to appear ...

For Christmas Eve Eve ...