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A long day on the trains, but a rewarding one

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2014-12-14 23:43:43 - Graham Ellis

At the end of a long day I'm on the 20:31 Swindon to Paddington train having ridden countless trains and spoke with many people today. The celebration of the first year's improved service on the TrasnWilts line with mulriple MPs, multiple Wiltshire Concillors and lots of other people crowding the buffet at Westbury, and with Connecting Wiltshire / TransWilts Vinyls applied to 153361. Two round trips to see Santa in the waiting room at Swindon. And now this trip to Cambridge.

I would like to be saying it all went to plan. But it didn't; there were some glitches due to a signal failure which delayed some trains ... including the one one that was taking children to see Santa, so we lost a quarter of the time at Swindon. And the second Santa train was also delayed in the same way. Fortunately, Santa is flexible and came with us on the first train as far as Melksham, where he had a nice cup of tea and travelled back up on the second. So everyone who wanted to got to see him, including some LUCKY children who were just normally travelling and were delighted to meet him.

The seriousness of the line was highlighted during the day by the number of ordinary passengers on the train; although that limited the numbers we could take, it also showed the real regular use of the service. The morning celebration train picked up 20 people at Melksham, and perhaps the same number at Chippenham, and I counted 158 people on the Santa train when we had only sold 122 tickets. So that's 36 non-Santa customers and an excellent load for a train in the middle of the day on Sunday.

Since I started writing this, I've arrived in London, crossed to King's Cross, and I'm now riding out to Cambridge. The 19:05 off Melksham eas 27 minutes late, the connection at Swindon missed as a result, and we dragged into London at 21:40. It then took 9 minuts to get out of the barrier, while I explained to the gateline that there's a blank plinth where there should be a TVM at Melksham, that the Train Manager didn't have a working machine with him, that the Swindon ticket office was shut and the machine wouldn't sell me a "from Melksham" ticket, and I ddn't see the train manager on the London train. Well, actually I didn't explain all those things - it seems it's the norm for things like this, but I mighty dislike being held up by the railway after I've arrived because of their failure to provide ticket purchase facilities earlier on. I'm also very use to having to spell M-E-L-K-... and be told "never heard of it". We have work to do still to make that statement even rarer. And I was somewhat mollified when I had to spell Cambridge for him too.

The train from King's Cross left spot on time, express to Cambridge. It usually does. Perhaps this is a level of service we can look forward to once electrification is completed.