There was a train from melksham?
Now one of the big surprises about the Melksham service is that is sometimes usable for longer distance business trips outwards from the town. The example / ticket here was to do a full day's work in the Filton area and the timing was idea for me, and over the past couple of months I've made a couple of other long distance trips in the same way, with more planned next week. I'm not alone in that either - even at 06:35 in the morning there are usually half a dozen people waiting for the Southampton train to appear ... and when it does, it's already got more people than that on from Chippenham.
Where this becomes less useful is in terms of return journeys (many of us return by bus ... which means arriving in Westbury, 7 miles up the road, over an hour before we get home), and in terms of cost. I've had a day return trip priced at 110.00 and another at 174.00 over the past few weeks, which were cut to around 30 pounds and 84 pounds by "splitting"; frankly, 174 pounds prices people off the train and not everyone knows to split - they'll travel by train once, be horrified at the price, and never use it again.
