What a contrast that is to the train that used to run (at around 6 O'Clock) after the shops closed and the soccer matches were out - with 50 or 60 people on it at times (and of course 3 times that when we gave it a bit of publicity as a "Santa Special"!). When there were five round trips a day, the earliest and the latest trains off Swindon were the quietest of the day - really a bit too "extreme".

The company is now only obliged to run two trains a day, one at a time specified by the government. If they wanted to provide a service that was demonstrably not used, what better way to do so than to run a train even earlier than the previous earliest train (which they do on Mondays to Fridays) or to retain the least used tarin of them all (which they did on Saturdays).  I'm not making any allegations here, by the way - just pointing out that FGW would have been hard pressed to come up with a timetable that's worse under the SLC, and one does wonder what the consultations we did in the summer of 2006 were in aid of.

But let me not be too negative.  The service show here, of which there is some prospect for next year, would make optimum use of the existing services and flesh them out to provide a really good timetable, in terms of it being just about the best that could be done with a single train serving right across the county