Swindon <-> Westbury service updates and amendments, ongoing discussion - 2026

[whole diary]

[JohnM]

An additional service will depart Chippenham at 18:15 and arrive at Melksham at 18:31.

EDIT that's a bus

[bobm]

A series of replacement buses in both directions between Chippenham and Westbury via Melksham and Trowbridge have now appeared on Journeycheck.

Leaving Chippenham at 15:41, 18:15 and 20:41

Leaving Westbury at 16:23, 18:37 and 21:16

Plus one from Swindon at 22:31 to Westbury.

[JohnM]

An additional service will depart Chippenham at 18:15 and arrive at Melksham at 18:31.

EDIT that's a bus

Well I was going to take the 17:29 Bristol-Paddington to Chippenham (17:57) and get that bus, but the 17:29 has been cancelled (shortage of train crew). So might as well take my usual 17:12 Bristol-Oxford (Chippenham 17:42) and hang around for half an hour.

[bobm]

The last TW service to run was operated by 158762 according to Real Time Trains.

It arrived at Westbury at 11:46.

If the same source is to be believed, it was then attached to 158767 and worked the continuation of the 11:30 from Cardiff Central to Portsmouth Harbour from Westbury scheduled at 13:03 but left at 13:16.

It is currently, again according to RTT^» (Real Time Trains - website), on its way back from the South Coast and is due to be uncoupled at Bristol Temple Meads at 17:53.

[grahame]

So might as well take my usual 17:12 Bristol-Oxford (Chippenham 17:42) and hang around for half an hour.

Yep ... that train arrives at Chippenham 7 minutes after the last alternative (not RRB^▸ (Rail Replacement Bus)) (x34) bus of the day to Melksham has left. A very early time for a last bus of the day - makes working day commutes from Bristol or Swindon to places like Lacock impractical.

[JohnM]

So might as well take my usual 17:12 Bristol-Oxford (Chippenham 17:42) and hang around for half an hour.

Yep ... that train arrives at Chippenham 7 minutes after the last alternative (not RRB^▸ (Rail Replacement Bus)) (x34) bus of the day to Melksham has left.

Ha - actually I took the 17:00 Bristol-Paddington to be safe (the 17:12 has been cancelled a few times, and typically not until after the 17:00 has departed), so I probably could have caught the x34 if I'd been awake.

But never mind - I've got a shady spot on Chippenham platform and it's a good 4G+ signal here so working isn't too unpleasant.

[JohnM]

...and the bus replacement will hopefully be an air-conned coach, and take quite a bit less time than the ventilation-only x34 to get to its destination.

[JohnM]

...and the bus replacement will hopefully be an air-conned coach, and take quite a bit less time than the ventilation-only x34 to get to its destination.

Well... good news and bad news...

Bad - there was no coach. Or a bus. That was despite the National Rail app showing it, and the email from Great Western Railway Alerting Service alerting me to it.

The bus had been scheduled to depart at 18:15. When I sauntered over to the station entrance at about 18:05, the helpful member of Chippenham station staff informed me that buses were only organised to handle planned outages eg. engineering work. He wasn't aware of the one promised by GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway). However they were running taxis; each time a train arrived they rounded up people that looked like they wanted to take the TransWilts line and off they went. As I'd just been happily sitting on the platform, I'd missed this. I'd have to wait for the next train arrival and taxi collection.

Good  - but fortunately at that point another taxi turned up looking for passengers. So me and one other person (headed for Westbury) were whisked away in a very nice/cool Merc E-class. (And he kindly dropped me at the bottom of Westlands Lane - about the same distance from home as Melksham station but saved about 5 mins journey time and saved him having to detour off the A350.)

So it wasn't too bad in the end - could have been a lot worse.

But I will be complaining to GWR:

• It's ridiculous to say a replacement bus will be running when it won't.
• Why wasn't there any communication between GWR and Chippenham station about the bus?
• It would have been helpful if there had been an announcement at the station about the taxi arrangements.

[JohnM]

Complaint form submitted. Avoiding "special characters" such as brackets and semicolons I've submitted another form about that. Gemini sums it up pretty well:

It is thoroughly absurd. Calling basic punctuation like parentheses () and semicolons ; "special characters" is a classic hallmark of outdated web development.
:
Banning characters entirely is a crude shortcut that forces the customer to write like a text bot from 2002.

It turns a simple complaint about a late train into a frustrating game of rewrite-the-sentence just to get past a regex filter.

[TaplowGreen]

Complaint form submitted. Avoiding "special characters" such as brackets and semicolons I've submitted another form about that. Gemini sums it up pretty well:

It is thoroughly absurd. Calling basic punctuation like parentheses () and semicolons ; "special characters" is a classic hallmark of outdated web development.
:
Banning characters entirely is a crude shortcut that forces the customer to write like a text bot from 2002.

It turns a simple complaint about a late train into a frustrating game of rewrite-the-sentence just to get past a regex filter.

Thankyou Alan Partridge! 

[TaplowGreen]

05:11 Gloucester to Southampton Central due 08:10
05:11 Gloucester to Southampton Central due 08:10 has been delayed at Swindon and is now 20 minutes late.
This is due to passengers causing a disturbance on a train.

06:35 Salisbury to Worcester Foregate Street due 09:47
06:35 Salisbury to Worcester Foregate Street due 09:47 is being delayed at Westbury.
This is due to a late running train being in front of this one.

[grahame]

Yesterday was another day when the service started OK but fell apart, and so badly that this thread got confusing, and I'm sharing the summary from the official open data feeds, as interpreted by Real Time Trains.



A summary like this does not show the disruption cause to people's lives, the frustrations to them when they are trying to travel on an advertised service, and the effect on the communities that should have been served of the failures to so do time and time again.

[grahame]

It turns a simple complaint about a late train into a frustrating game of rewrite-the-sentence just to get past a regex filter.

Been there - and does it still not help you by highlighting the problem characters, leaving you to search and find them within your explanation.  Get a feeling of "we really don't want your feedback in spite of what we say, so we will make it as hard for you as we can". It is also (I believe) commonly appreciated that if you have to rewrite / revise a letter of complaint multiple times, you will become less angry and will be exhausted into toning it down with each rewrite / revision.

I am reminded ...

The prompt: "Choose a new password."
User: potato
System: "Sorry, password must contain at least 8 letters."
User: boiled potato
System: "Sorry, password must contain at least one number."
User: 1 boiled potato
System: "Sorry, password cannot contain spaces."
User: 50f*ckingboiledpotatoes
System: "Sorry, password already in use"

[grahame]

Here a question for someone on GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) operations (I hope):

On the day that you cancel trains
On the day that you run less trains
On the day that you terminate trains short

How, for the love of God, do you have the audacity to peddle the excuse that for to a lack of drivers a service is being cancelled.

Clearly GWR thinks its passengers are idiots

I came on to the Coffee Shop a few minutes ago to record / summarise yesterday's performance or lack thereof ... but find myself again reporting on new cancellations.

12:17 Westbury to Swindon due 13:01
13:14 Swindon to Westbury due 13:57

13:14 Swindon to Westbury due 13:57 will be cancelled.
This is due to a fault on this train.

The last TW service to run was operated by 158762 according to Real Time Trains.

It arrived at Westbury at 11:46.

If the same source is to be believed, it was then attached to 158767 and worked the continuation of the 11:30 from Cardiff Central to Portsmouth Harbour from Westbury scheduled at 13:03 but left at 13:16.

It is currently, again according to RTT^» (Real Time Trains - website), on its way back from the South Coast and is due to be uncoupled at Bristol Temple Meads at 17:53.

Bad - there was no coach. Or a bus. That was despite the National Rail app showing it, and the email from Great Western Railway Alerting Service alerting me to it.

The bus had been scheduled to depart at 18:15. When I sauntered over to the station entrance at about 18:05, the helpful member of Chippenham station staff informed me that buses were only organised to handle planned outages eg. engineering work. He wasn't aware of the one promised by GWR. However they were running taxis; each time a train arrived they rounded up people that looked like they wanted to take the TransWilts line and off they went. As I'd just been happily sitting on the platform, I'd missed this. I'd have to wait for the next train arrival and taxi collection.

I don't think that "GWR" condsiders all of its passengers to be idiots.  However, there is a lower standard of provision of data than one might wish at times, whatever that's due to.   Sometimes the staff operating the system day to day may be taking the easy way out, but very often they are frustrated themselves.  And at a management level, there are frustations too and the inability to manage as they could if there weren't other tiers.  This is compounded by the systems which seem to be crude, fairweather only, and designed to keep cost down rather than service up and thinking customers undertanding and informed.

I too have been stopped at Chippenham and have missed rail replacement options because I did not seek out staff and they were not running to an announced timetable, to then have to await others to share a following vehicle. 

The system is not clever there.  The real solution would not be to send off the train that had been running the service to Portsmouth, of course. It's just possible there was a cab fault and it could only be driven from one end, or that it was running out of fuel and had to be put on a diagram that got it back to base.  It's also possible that 2 cars on 1F19-  the Cardiff to Portsmouth train - with the local trains cancelled too - was a bit of a problem, and so the TransWilts train was commandeered and the service cancelled for the rest of the day.   That of course is a scurrilous suggestion bearing in mind that senior GWR managers informed us and our MP^▸ (Member of Parliament, or Mile Post (a method of measuring the railway in miles and chains from a starting point - usually London), depending on context) in person that this does not happen, so it must be cab fault or fuel level?

[TaplowGreen]

Here a question for someone on GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) operations (I hope):

On the day that you cancel trains
On the day that you run less trains
On the day that you terminate trains short

How, for the love of God, do you have the audacity to peddle the excuse that for to a lack of drivers a service is being cancelled.

Clearly GWR thinks its passengers are idiots

I came on to the Coffee Shop a few minutes ago to record / summarise yesterday's performance or lack thereof ... but find myself again reporting on new cancellations.

12:17 Westbury to Swindon due 13:01
13:14 Swindon to Westbury due 13:57

13:14 Swindon to Westbury due 13:57 will be cancelled.
This is due to a fault on this train.

The last TW service to run was operated by 158762 according to Real Time Trains.

It arrived at Westbury at 11:46.

If the same source is to be believed, it was then attached to 158767 and worked the continuation of the 11:30 from Cardiff Central to Portsmouth Harbour from Westbury scheduled at 13:03 but left at 13:16.

It is currently, again according to RTT^» (Real Time Trains - website), on its way back from the South Coast and is due to be uncoupled at Bristol Temple Meads at 17:53.

Bad - there was no coach. Or a bus. That was despite the National Rail app showing it, and the email from Great Western Railway Alerting Service alerting me to it.

The bus had been scheduled to depart at 18:15. When I sauntered over to the station entrance at about 18:05, the helpful member of Chippenham station staff informed me that buses were only organised to handle planned outages eg. engineering work. He wasn't aware of the one promised by GWR. However they were running taxis; each time a train arrived they rounded up people that looked like they wanted to take the TransWilts line and off they went. As I'd just been happily sitting on the platform, I'd missed this. I'd have to wait for the next train arrival and taxi collection.

I don't think that "GWR" condsiders all of its passengers to be idiots.  However, there is a lower standard of provision of data than one might wish at times, whatever that's due to.   Sometimes the staff operating the system day to day may be taking the easy way out, but very often they are frustrated themselves.  And at a management level, there are frustations too and the inability to manage as they could if there weren't other tiers.  This is compounded by the systems which seem to be crude, fairweather only, and designed to keep cost down rather than service up and thinking customers undertanding and informed.

I too have been stopped at Chippenham and have missed rail replacement options because I did not seek out staff and they were not running to an announced timetable, to then have to await others to share a following vehicle. 

The system is not clever there.  The real solution would not be to send off the train that had been running the service to Portsmouth, of course. It's just possible there was a cab fault and it could only be driven from one end, or that it was running out of fuel and had to be put on a diagram that got it back to base.  It's also possible that 2 cars on 1F19-  the Cardiff to Portsmouth train - with the local trains cancelled too - was a bit of a problem, and so the TransWilts train was commandeered and the service cancelled for the rest of the day.   That of course is a scurrilous suggestion bearing in mind that senior GWR managers informed us and our MP^▸ (Member of Parliament, or Mile Post (a method of measuring the railway in miles and chains from a starting point - usually London), depending on context) in person that this does not happen, so it must be cab fault or fuel level?

What it comes down to, and it's evidenced time and time again, is a total lack of a customer service culture from top to bottom in the rail sector which is decades behind the curve in this area - that doesn't mean that there aren't pockets of excellence and staff who go the extra mile, but overall it's a systemic failure in an industry which in this respect is still stuck in the 1970s with an attitude that customers should be grateful for whatever they are offered, and where negative feedback is treated with scepticism and defensiveness rather than "how can we learn from this and make it better?"

Hopefully the onset of GBR^▸ (Great British Railways) will do something to address this, but culture is the hardest thing to change in any organisation, and as a monopoly supplier there is even less motivation other than a commitment, which will need to be addressed, to put the customer at the forefront of everything they do - the taxpayer and the customer (more often one and the same) deserve this at least.