Good news for Rail Services in Melksham

Last week was an excellent one for the TransWilts railway and train services - Swindon and Chippenham via Melksham to Trowbridge and Westbury, and on to Dilton Marsh, Warminster and Salisbury.

On Tuesday, the first steam train in 50 years called at Melksham, picking up around 100 people for a day out in Canterbury. On Wednesday, the Department for Transport announced that Wiltshire Council was successful in its £4.25m funding bid; hugely significant news. On Thursday, we learned that fare anomalies that have discouraged users have been corrected (Swindon to Salisbury no longer costs £56)

The current franchise - run by First group - finishes in a year's time (April 2013, but that may slip a month or two). And as part of the process of awarding the next Franchise, the department for Transport consulted widely in the first quarter of this year.   They'll be issuing an invitation to Tender to the 4 pre-quaified bidders shortly.  We are already talking with all 4 bidders - each in their own way - about the shape of services needed with the intent of helping all of them put in the most appropriate proposal for the route covered, customers and potential customers, and businesses effected by that custom.  The Partnership strongly supported Wiltshire Council's bid, and now that funding has been granted we all have a very great deal to do.

There's so much news here that it's hard to filter it out to a few bullet points - but basically we're looking at a daily service of about 8 trains each way (that's about every 2 hours during the day, perhaps hourly at the peak) with excellent connections if not always through trains all the way from Swindon to Salisbury.  We're looking at infrastructure at stations so that they can cope with the extra traffic - foot, cycling, bus, taxi, car, and working on and with bus services to ensure that other primary points to be connected are indeed connected.  And we're looking at information and ticketing systems and structures that will market the services to people, easily provide them with time and price information when they need it, and make it easy for them to travel, giving them such a good experience when they do that they keep coming back.  More at http://www.wellho.net/mouth/3793_Excellent-Rail-News-what-it-really-means.html (my personal blog) ;  if you would like further technical information and detail please get in touch - I have mountains of it!

Finally, a big "Thank you" to everyone who has supported us thus far.   We value that support, we still need it through the implementation phase.  But I just wanted to say we wouldn't have got even this far without it.