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Five guests, three groups, one car

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-12-11 23:49:26 - Graham Ellis

Five people staying with us ... in three groups ... with one car between them in the car park.

That's a statistic I noticed last week at our five room hotel here in Melksham - and it struck me "what a sensible balance". Two of the guests had arrived in the car, two by airport taxi from Heathrow, and one has arrived at Melksham station by train, from where I had picked him up. The party in the car also left by car, I dropped off the train guy at Chippenham station, and I put the two who arrived by taxi onto the National Express coach - also at Chippenham.

We sometimes regard a choice between road and rail, public and private transport as taking sides ... but in fact it's far more complex than that. For some journeys, only a car is practical .. but for others, a car would be totally inappropriate - it's much more a question of choosing the right horse (or iron or plastic horse) for the right course (or journey). And end to end journeys are likely to be a combination of various modes of transport.

We're set up at Well House Manor to receive guests arriving by road or rail, private or public transport. All the modes exist, but some in a less practical form that others. The "car lobby" shouldn't grumble at the public transport users, who (if they too were on the road) would lead to more overcrowding ... and the public transport users shouldn't get miffed when people drive - there are times that public transport just ain't practical - such as when I have to work in Cambridge for the week, taking some 12 laptop computers with me for delegates on a training course I am giving to use.

Local transportation in the Melksham area may be good (I can find *some* holes, though) but medium to longer distance, Melksham's connections suck. And information on public transport options to and from Melksham is hard to come by and correlate.

Long Distance Issues

Did you notice how I dropped of my returning customers IN CHIPPENHAM for their trains and coaches?

Chippenham has a coach to London every 2 hours, also calling at Heathrow airport. Melksham - perhaps 2/3 the size of Chippenham - has one coach per DAY.

Chippenham has two direct trains PER HOUR to London. Melksham has just two trains per DAY in each direction, and the times they run are not the ones I would have selected given the choice, either.

From Chippenham, a dual carriageway runs up to the M4 motorway for those people who'll be using their private cars. From Melksham, you can take anywhere between 20 minutes and 50 minutes on a normal day to be on that motorway ... and if it's an abnormal day with road works in Beanacre, you can only achieve the 50 minutes if you know the 'rat run' through The Forest.

Information

We run a hotel .. and people ask "how do we get to you" and "how do we get home". The question is far easier asked than answered, even supposing there's a good and appropriate service on offer.

Wiltshire Council just wrote to me "Do you want your public timetables and information", offering me a list of some 70 publications they have available - some theirs, and some third party. What would I like? What would my customers and the Tourist Information Centre like?

a) A map of all local bus and rail routes (a bus map IS available for Wiltshire)

b) Timetables for each local bus and rail route (West Wilts bus routes are provided in a combined timetable - but it does not cover rail)

c) Details of long distance coach services from Melksham and Chippenham to London and elsewhere (the best I can do for the Melksham route is to find the service on the National Express Web site, if I know where it goes!)

d) Train services from Melksham, in particular something that's easy for people traveling to / from London, Swindon and Bristol to use. (For London to Melksham, I need 3 timetables and have to correlate them including Portsmouth to Cardiff, which is not intuitive!)

e) Train services, Swindon - Chippenham - Melksham - Trowbridge - Westbury - Salisbury, both through services and connections (need to correlate 2 timetables)

f) Summary tables / combined timetables from Melksham to Trowbridge, Bath and Chippenham (for "all public transport to Trowbridge", for example, I need to link up data for six different routes from 5 tables in the West Wilts guide one of which is currently on an amendment sheet, and that Cardiff to Portsmouth train timetable!)

So that's just two out of six of the documents that I and my customers need that are readily available ... and newcomers / tourists coming in to the area can hardly use something of they're not even able to find out that it exists!