Agreed: I've become something of a convert to the bus service from Melksham to Bath Spa station.

 
On Saturday, I went [from Melksham] to Weymouth for the day by train.  Almost "routine" for me, but not for others met along the way. 

I paid £15.70 for my ticket, and £15.70 for a companion ticket available with my type of railcard, purchasing the ticket from Chippenham rather than from Melksham as it's the same price, and that allowed us to return via Bath and the bus should we not want to co-ordinate our return with the infrequent service that calls at Melksham.

The Melksham service is used - we need to remind people of that!

There were 68 passengers on the 09:09 train when it left Melksham - I am always very much aware that our sideline does not attract as service users (m)any of the formal RACI people who are key to its ongoing provision and I take a look on each train I use on the line and gather data so I can inform people. The saying "Use it or lose it" is commonly used for all sorts of services - but there's a need to have some data about its use to inform all the RACI people as they review/develop/amend the service for the future.



I am aware that the railway line to Felletin (in France) closed a fortnight ago, and that our UK government has two railway headlines - "increased reliability" and "keeping taxpayer costs down" and they mention "simplifying fares".  They have not headlined "maintaining the network at its current size", nor "maintaining service levels", nor "keeping fares down".  Beware!  Collecting evidence of use and ramming it down the throats or the R, A, C, and I people is a key community and user action to ensure they know that each train on our service has at least 20 times the number of passengers on it that the train I took to Felletin to try it out in July had (I was one of three).  We are using it ... we could and would use it that much more if the service ran, reliably, at an appropriate level of at least one train per hour in each direction, all day and every day.

RACI - Responsible (who does the task), Accountable (who owns the task's completion), Consulted (who provides input), and Informed (who needs to be updated).

The Melksham service is used - we need to remind people of that!

I and my companion travelled a few miles to Dorchester in the afternoon, and returned from there.  Utter chaos, with two successive trains from Weymouth via Westbury showing up as cancelled; a very long and off-topic story.  Prior experience helped me sort out our journey and that for other people too; we left Dorchester in a train of 5 carriages, with 58 people in just one of them. It wasn't possible to walk the whole way through (no corridor between some of the carriages) but that train got use to Westbury, where we changed onto a train running via Melksham that was over an hour later - our intent was the 17:34 from Weymouth (quarter of an hour later at Dorchester) and we eventually dragged into Melksham at around 21:45 on a late-running final northbound train of the day.  28 people on that train into Melksham, 9 go off and a further 7 got on - so once again, and even with the disruption an order of magnitude busier than that Felletin train.

We need a more frequent and easy to use service. And that "easy to use" includes fare systems that are understandable, and reliability that is much improved and where passenger information and alternatives are well provided on the few occasions it does go wrong.

Pictured – people waiting at Dorchester as a train home eventually pulls in.  And the group here was smaller than it might have been – this train had been adverised earlier as CANCELLED but had then been re-instated, and in the “Cancelled” period, I noted
* people booking and heading onwards in a taxi
* people going home and planning to make the journey the next day
* people calling up friends / family to give them lifts
* people transferring to Dorchester (South) to travel via Bournemouth and Southampton
* people headed for rail replacement buses which (if they existed / ran) would have been even later than the re-instated train






As an afterthought on our Melksham journey, it’s “all about” combining lots of journeys onto a single train. In the most recent data that I have, Dorchester is only the 95th most popular destination from Melksham (based on ticket sales MKM – see https://www.passenger.chat/MKM.html?limit=1500&sortby=5 ) 

The top 5 journeys by train from Melksham are to Swindon, Chippenham, London, Bristol and Trowbridge.

The next five are to Bath, Westbury, Warminster, Salisbury and Weymouth.  An explanation is needed for Bath being such a low number – it’s because the bus is far better for that journey – direct without a change, more frequent, and reliable.

The next dozen? … Cardiff, Frome, Bradford-on-Avon, Gloucester, Reading, Pangbourne, Stroud, Cheltenham Spa, Filton Abbey Wood, Dilton Marsh, Southampton and Oxford.

Notable other mentions within the top 50 – Weston-super-Mare (24), Swansea (25), Birmingham (26), Taunton (27), Exeter (32), Gatwick Airport(33), Plymouth (34), Stansted Airport (38), Torquay (39) and Paignton (43), Heathrow Airport (46) and Portsmouth (50).