Bath to Melksham on a Sunday

[whole diary]

[Mark A]

A friend was reminded (by an intrusion of reality into a sunny day full of type 3 fun) that on Sunday only the last Faresaver bus from Bath to Devizes leaves Bath just before 7pm. He *did* manage to catch that service after heading for the bus stop at a trot.

(After that, there's an option by train, the 9.13pm from Bath into a somewhat relaxed connection to Melksham which sort-of shows the value of having a train service that's more than the bare-bones one as first re-introduced.)

Mark

[grahame]

A friend was reminded (by an intrusion of reality into a sunny day full of type 3 fun) that on Sunday only the last Faresaver bus from Bath to Devizes leaves Bath just before 7pm. He *did* manage to catch that service after heading for the bus stop at a trot.

(After that, there's an option by train, the 9.13pm from Bath into a somewhat relaxed connection to Melksham which sort-of shows the value of having a train service that's more than the bare-bones one as first re-introduced.)

Mark

Sunday evening is a real issue.

You refer to "First Introduction".   At the time that the Coffeen Shop was founded, there weren't just two Sunday trains on the TransWilts.   The Service Level Commitment on First from December 2006 called for two trains each way per day Monday to Saturday, and two trains from Westbury to Swindon on a Sunday. The two trains ran at about 18:00 and 20:00 from Westbury as I recall, both the same physical train and running back empty between the two services.

One of our first victories-for-common-sense was to have the train return in passenger service, followed summer 2011 with a Chamber of Commerce Commerce supported service early in the morning on 7 summer Sundays, with the early train from Westbury to Weymouth starting back from Swindon.  An interesting summer and we have to be very careful not to oversell / overfill the trains on those Sundays.


Edit note: Minor typo corrected, purely for clarity. CfN^▸ (Chris from Nailsea, an administrator on this forum). 

[Mark A]

Thanks for the info on the service revival's early years. I seem to recall two weekday services of an evening that allowed a quick circular trip via Melksham from Bath for anyone needing a fix of train travel after work - with enough time to leap off at Melksham for a bite to eat before heading back for the second train. Thinking back to the early 2000s it would be pretty good, today, to have some of the train services that Bath had then** but it's really good that Melksham now has a somewhat more rounded timetable than it did at that time.

Mark

** Full disclosure: heading for the line to Buxton in the nineties we suddenly realised that there was a weekday loco-and-carriages service from Reading to Manchester that, on the way, at 8:30 in the morning, called at Oldfield Park, fitting our ideal travel itinerary like a glove.