While I sympathise with Mandy and Sam's situation, the direct service was always regarded as experimental, so perhaps not the best thing to build one's life around.
In a way willc is right perhaps one shouldn't build one's travelling habits around an experimental service.
However, that rather puts the dampner on any new through journey possibilities. It's hardly condusive to building up use on any new service to say: "Beware this is an experimental service it might be withdrawn at any time so don't change your travelling habits to make use of it"
If this mantra had been applied to the Bristol Oxfords and the enhanced Melksham services I'm sure any potential users would not have bothered to start using them in case they provided too convinient a service upon which they might become dependant. Thus ensuring they failed quickly and disappeared, so they shouldn't have been started in the first place.
Which logically means we are stuck with the current pattern of services because you can't start an experimental service because you have to tell people it may be withdrawn at any time, so don't bother using it, hard luck!
Picking up on an old thread that has been re-opened here ... I think these views expressed show just how "experimental" service are almost set up to fail.
From 2001 through 2006, I made extensive use of the enhanced "TransWilts" service and indeed much of my work was based around it, as it brought some 40% of the customers to the business I work for into Melksham - a town of some 24,000 people. But the loss of the practical long distance connections at a suitable time of day (from London you can now leave at 17:30 and arrive at 19:11, or on the last train of the night from Paddington and sleep on the platform at Swindon - and those are you ONLY choices to Melksham!) renders it impractical for the business visitor.
Could it have done better? Yes, of course it could - plenty of other material is availoable that talks of advertising and reliability. But the irony is that it
DID» do well and a service that was an experimental success with a huge growth in traffic, and huge ongoing potential - was cut off by remote decisions which were, to say the least, controvertial and didn't yake full account of the real situation on the ground.
Some of the very long distance through services are more of an operational convenience than a requirement for specific traffic flows; if you were to label Warminster to Malvern as "experimental" and split the route at - say - Bristol in the future I'm not sure how much traffic you would loose. But there is a case of "once bitten, twice shy" that could make the building up of traffic again from the various places mentioned a bit more difficult. But, given a good service and a committment for a number of years, only a bit more difficult - with enthusiasm and a bandwagon rolling, and a blossoming population (certainly in the case of West Wilts) the past would soon be forgot, save as a lesson in keeping an eye on a valued service and ensuring that cuts with dubious fondadtion are not applied again.
