Thank you for that long, but engaging, post, Grahame. It reminds me that I would have been regarded as eccentric for much of my time in private industry as I visited customers by public transport; anywhere between Perth and Portland.  I gained a lot of pleasure from the journeys at that time, but there was also some logic in that I was working long days and not having to drive when tired was a safer option.

Your post also illustrates that there is a lot more to modal choice than the transport modellers' favourite variables: cost and journey time. The transport planning profession is more alert to these things nowadays,  but it is hard to model qualitative dimensions (things you can't put a number on) and the information to calibrate a model may simply not exist.

Beware!
Things that are easy to measure but relatively unimportant tend to assert excessive influence;
Things that are important but hard to define and measure are overlooked in policy and objective setting.

So often, we approach planning with a preconceived "solution" and then find enough reasons to justify it. That's not how it's supposed to work but the relevant guidance is usually ignored.

Strange, isn't it, that, outside London, the UK is notably poor at making its public transport work as a system (not just bus and rail: even the railway itself struggles to think of itself as a system). It is conceivable that Devizes Gateway could be made to work for the benefit of the town economy. To do so, I think, probably needs revolutionary change over the whole country.

 
Marine traffic link to Grahames ferry. It’s a fairly new ferry, lacking character versus previous Brittany Ferries vessels

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:6732128

 
I just knew Coffee Shop forum member stuving would know that precise location. 

Going back to grahame's original post,



I happen to recognise those waves , as they were also there in the Bay of Biscay when I traversed it, on board the QE2 with my wife to be, some more than 30 years ago.

She was a Merchant Navy officer on the QE2 at that time, which gave me some rather privileged access to parts of the ship which were not available to other passengers - the engine rooms, and bridge, for example.

I was enjoying a conducted tour of the bridge of the QE2, in company with just a few similarly privileged passengers, when our guide suddenly broke off from his talk, leapt across a desk and grabbed a radio handset.  Fair play to him: while delivering his speech, he had also picked up a radio message on the loudspeaker on the bridge.  It was made from an RAF Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft, asking for permission from 'the Cunard ship in the Bay of Biscay' (like there was anyone else ) for permission to do a fly-past, for training purposes.

Our guide, Steve or Simon (and I also can't remember his surname, but he was First Officer, Navigation) promptly invited them to fly past - then went on the PA system to announce to all passengers that 'there will be an RAF aircraft flying past on the starboard side'. We could almost feel the QE2 leaning over to the right as passengers rushed to that side for a view 

My only regret is that I didn't have my camera / telephoto lens with me on the bridge at that time: I merely got a couple of snaps from my mobile phone with the Nimrod appearing as just a speck in the distance.

CfN.

 
I made a claim on 20th September, yesterday, 20th working day bounced back to me as incomplete, please update.
Entered claim, changed nothing, resubmitted.
Approved this morning.
The sceptic in me thinks the 20day bounce back is somewhat strange as they have a 20 day target, fudging stats for not meeting the 20 day timescale?

 
Some excellent points from Noggin, Trowres and others.

I came on here ... intending to quote points from both of you, and wider, and my own expertience heart, head and feet having lived within a mile of that stretch of railway for 15 years. 

Heart - the emotional desire for it to happen
Head - real thoughts as to what it might do and where the issued would be
Feet - actual travel experience living less than a mile from the line in question and what we did with no station

I got rather carried away - make of this what you will.  Spoiler - if done right it should work (and lots of very terse comments below hide a whole lot of experience and pointers) but if not done right / the bits don't join up ...

Experience widened to make comment / perhaps draw more recent lessons from Melksham ...

---

As a former resident in Easterton, we lived just a mile from the main line railway. We could walk across the footpaths and watch the express trains headed for London and the West Country - but they were useless to us for travel purposes. Central London was reached by car to Andover of Basingstoke and train into Waterloo; Pewsey occasionally.  I travelled a very great deal for work - drove 30,000 miles a year, never took the bus and hardly even the train.  Much of the milage was for work and with heavy equipment that meant my vehicle had to be a people carrier - were there a requirement to travel with that weight and bulk these days, it would still be via a big car.  Even in Central London.

Times changed, and the need for heavy equipment reduced.  Running IT courses, we moved from a Sun or Silicon Graphics workstation shared between two delegates, to a workstation for each delegate.  They shrank into laptops, which became in time a fleet of A4 sized machines that could pack for travel into a paper box, alternating for passing between the training note sets that our delegates worked to. And towards the end of my training career, we had moved to a position where most delegates preferred to use their own laptops, and I carried only a limited number of our company machines which became "just in case" adjuncts and were rarely used. 

Towards the end of my training career, I was "training" much more.  After 15 years living in Easterton, we moved to Melksham; we purchased a listed building in uninhabitable condition on 11th August 1999, standing outside our new home as we watched the total eclipse, the rooks calling concerned at the unexpected nighttime, and we were both excited and wondering what we had done.  And we moved in on 24th December - "must be in for Christmas", with the only room practical as our bedroom (safe floor) was on the third floor (fourth for any USA readers), and the only loo and leccy were on the ground floor, with a string of multiways.  I digress.

From Melksham, standard station run was "Kiss and Ride" via Chippenham, second choice Westbury, third choice Trowbridge.  And as there came to be less need for carrying beyond the capacity of what I could manage without a car, it became the preferred way to travel. Yes, I enjoyed open road driving but fighting jams all the way to Cambridge was not "Open Road" and it was tiring.  As course tutor, the teacher had to be there for 08:30 or 09:30 depending on what time we started, and that was of critical importance.  With Chippenham to London fares at peak times being high, and with our fixed expenses quotations, it was logical to travel up on a Sunday afternoon / evening, stay the night (easy to find somewhere cheap and cheerless near Paddington, even for London) and then be fresh to teach.   In those early days in Melksham, never the station there.  Too few trains, not at the right time, and nothing to fall back on if they failed.    The 22:16 bus from Chippenham Station was an excellent way home at the end of the course - saving Lisa the drive out late at night, though on many trips it left before the 22:11 train arrived.

 I used Melksham Station - err - when I could; from 2001 to 2006 there was a very thin service but it did work for inbound customers. Where just one person needed a course, they came to us and we would pick them up on the evening before and drop them off at their B&B.  Courses finished in time for them to catch the 17:00 homewards. Come 2007, the 17:00 gone and a service at either 19:50 (or 07:20 the next morning) and it became pickups from Chippenham and lifts back there. Our customer base - even 20 years ago - tended to be [environmentally aware / green] and a surprising number - around a half - arrived and left by public transport.

By 2014 when our service stepped back up from useless to useable though still thin, we reverted to offering pickups / dropoffs almost-only at Melksham Station and it worked well, though by that time I was spending far more time on site training and far less time in our Melksham base.  That was because we were ahead of the curve; our initially-niche topics like Perl, PHP MySQL and Python which no-one saw a training market for when we set up had become much more mainstream, and rather than our delegates being the one odd-bod at large organisations, the technology was being so useful that it was adopted by larger teams.

And so - having stepped the service back up - my own business use grew dramatically (bolstered by the need to carry less explained earlier) and the use by our trainee customers faded a little.   In 2006, we had taken over a former B&B for delegates and our public courses had become largely residential; it worked for the delegates and it worked for us, but it gave us a resource that needed to pay its way or at least break even, and rooms that were only used be delegates for perhaps have the time weren't cost effective.  And we were being asked "can we stay - we work at a business locally" and "My son and daughter-in-law live in Melksham and we're coming to visit them - but they have been breeding and don't have any spare rooms now".  And so we were moved to accept more general hotel bookings.  These customers were - if I characterise - less "public transport aware".  It was rare for them to arrive in anything but a private car, or to go out anywhere other that in their own car or a taxi (and ah, there in another tangent I will avoid.

Business journeys WERE able to start from Melksham again, and did so.  I reckon my travel miles didn't change much but my car driving miles slashed from 30,000 to 3,000 a year to far less than that now.  And 27,000 miles at an average of 45 m.p.h. is 600 hours a year. Roads around Easterton, Devizes, Melksham are not renowned for high speed. I got to be very much part of The Archers' community, listening on my way home - and indeed had done so from perhaps 1980 when we moved to Chippenham to cover a sales territory described as the South West (Shrivenham to Penzance!). At current prices - £9 per gallon, and 30 miles per gallon - a thousand gallons a year, £9,000 on fuel alone.  And that's before registration, insurance, serving including oils, tyres and parts, and depreciation.  Tutor needs to turn up in a decent vehicle, so an old banger won't do; we did try a retired London Taxi as a "character" vehicle we could get away with, but it turned out to have been retired because it was knackered.  Some wonderful stories to tell, but I got to know the AA man in Dublin very well, and it was exhausting to drive over long distances.

So since 2014, my use of Melksham Station has been much more personal business and much less by persons using my business - which in any case we retired just pre-covid.  My very first outbound - at the end of the day the trial service of 8 trains each way per day started - was to Thun, via Harwich, Hoek van Holland and an Interrail pass - to teach Lua, would you believe? And other notable destinations have include not only those near stations (and a wide range, from Bow Brickhill to Farnborough Main, Kirkhill and Waterbeach) but on occasions by onward bus - no other way, these days, to Ashby-de-la-Zouch or St Asaph.

I started writing - oops - several hours ago - in giving follow up examples for the post about Devizes Gateway, potential traffic there, how it might be abstractive, whether it would be used, how it might effect the buses.  I fear my example and experiences quoted, though we once live in what would be it's catchment, is a bit of an unusual one and whilst it may be taken as a learning and study case, it cannot be multiplied up to give a valid lesson.

That post does mention buses. I have, so far, only done so tangentially in these ramblings.  Would a Devizes Gateway station impact on bus use in the Devizes area?  Now THERE is an interesting question!

Trains are typically medium distance and upwards uses. Buses are much more local?  When we had a training centre and indeed a hotel I cannot recall any guests or delegates checking in after a bus journey to reach us. I can recall many hotel leisure guests asking us about Park and Ride for Bath which they wanted to visit while in the area, and the way they often needed to be convinced to leave their car on our drive and take the bus from outside - "no point in you driving to catch a bus when one goes direct from here!".

I contend that buses and trains are much more complementary than competitive - born out by evidence of where people go using each of the transport types.  However, there is very much a need to link up and connect. There are 100 places you can board a bus in the Melksham area, and there is just one station platform.  For public transport to work well as an attractive total journey for people, connections need to work between the two modes physically (bus stops and railway platforms close by each other), time wise (routinely providing good and reliable connections throughout appropriately frequent service) and organised passenger friendly (combined information and ticketing offered, without each having their own complex and daunting rule set, and a get-you-there guarantee and not a leave-you-stranded scenario if something goes wrong).   Provide those criteria are met then, yes, there's every best chance of Devizes Gateway, and a new township around it, being a roaring success.

 

 

but it would be an occasional, very short notice, menu change.

 

Indeed - passing la Pointe du Raz.

 

A trip along the Radstock-Mells route is instructive as to what can happen with unmaintained track and earthworks as the line hasn't been lifted, which is not to say that in various places it has not moved. For starters, it appears that track laid on a curve has a tendency to work its way to the inside of said curve, especially if it's helped by movement in the face of the embankment on the inside of the curve. Perhaps the one encourages the other.

 
I remember travelling on a VT class 158 from Swindon to Cheltenham Spa during that short-lived service.  It was oh so comfortable compared to the Sprinters that were normally used - it was so smooth and quiet.
To be fair to the Sprinters, they got you there, and the Golden Valley line through Stroud is scenic rather than fast.
As for the Pacers that were used on the route at one time, hmm, well, they were OK on plain welded line, but otherwise I had to brace myself and hope the thing didn't bounce itself off the track. 

 

Yes, we are ... on the 22:00 last night (Friday) off Portsmouth, the "Salamanca" bound for Santander where we are scheduled to arrive at 08:00 tomorrow (Sunday).  Three buses, an overcrowded three carriage train, and now the ferry. Boarded on deck three; only telling you that because I'm looking for a three pattern through this post.  Long queue for the lifts to our deck; usual "survival of the fittest mode" which means that everyone else got up before we did, and after a pleasant chat with the ferry staff we had a lift to ourselves.

I can share a picture - taken within the last hour - that will give you a much closer triangulation onto us



I can show you some of the great features here and on open supply



And I can tell you the official view of transpotting in these parts

 
I couldn't possibly have posted such an answer, as I have inside information. 

 
As that figure in the Simpsons-themed dress looks like a Spanish one, are you crossing the Bay of Biscay on your way to Northern Spain?

 
Heathrow seems to be losing passengers and shrinking, based on last few months CAA passenger data, with every month lower than 2025

April 2026 : 6,721,740 down from April 2025 : 7,099,310
May 2026 : 7,121,542 down from May 2025 : 7,204,362
June 2026 : 7,227,536 down from June 2025 : 7,359,020
July 2026 : 7,859,325 down from July 2025 : 7,981,535
August 2026 : 7,866,719 down from August 2025 : 8,036,159

https://www.caa.co.uk/data-and-analysis/uk-aviation-market/airports/uk-airport-data/uk-airport-data-2026/august-2026/

No recent month has reached the 8m+ passengers of August 2025

Of course aircraft movements, and passenger numbers do not stay in sync if different size planes are used over time

March 38,817 aircraft movements
April 38,638
May 40,590
June 39,415
July 41,206
August 41,569
obviously those over 40k reflect 31 day months, others 30 days

 

Indeed - if you're looking at the South Coast, international ferries only from Dover, Newhaven, Portsmouth and Plymouth these days. Gone are Sheerness, Ramsgate, Folkestone, Southampton, Poole and Weymouth even in my memory.

 
But not from Poole these days

 

Source: T&E

 

Very good research, Richard - as you say looks like it operated with a 2-car 158 for a very short period!  Presumably they took over from Wales & West, before GWR took over from them?

The WTT is a reminder that there were just the four through Paddington to Gloucester/Cheltenham services per day back then.  Now there are sixteen!

 

Suggestion noted: now done.

CfN. 

 
On the upside, venison as an option on the Pullman will make a nice change?

 
The fittings and furniture that are functional rather than plush or posh do strongly suggest a ferry.

 

Indeed, and now that we have come down up for breakfast, there are more clues

 
Coincidentally, there was a report on French TV news yesterday about the delays and damage caused by wild animals being hit by trains. Of course SNCF does have a lot of railway that's not fenced, plus a lot of wild boar - big, heavy, solid things. There were some numbers for collisions with boar and deer, which I can't remember exactly, but something like eight per day for France.

So they have been trying out fancy new beast scarers, which detect the animal and make a suitable noise at it, chosen to make it move away. The company involved, ElanRail, claim that their "Blue Sentinel" has reduced collisions by 90% year on year in the trial.

SNCF have also been fencing some lines; that may help with other kinds of trespasser of course.

 

At the risk of talking to myself, I have looked back for my data source and found various.  Seems that sheep are more of a problem in Wales, and people over the whole of GB:

https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/deer-oh-deer-network-rail-unveils-the-countrys-worst-trespassing-criminals-embargoed-20-august-2024-0600

https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/revealed-animals-who-top-the-lists-of-trespassers-on-the-track-on-wales-and-western-region


And Network Rail have even provided a graphic in case anyone doesn't know what a sheep, a swan or a badger is - though I would query their description as a "crime" which - to me - indicates a conscious intent to break the law.

 
But aren't we meant to be moving away from everything being London-centric? Let another part of the country (Manchester?) benefit from that growth, along with all the extra pollution and noise when we really should be trying to reduce air miles whether for passengers or freight.

I'm also struck by the PM's suggestion that it is a matter for London and Londoners, when planning more generally is reducing the ability for local people to have any influence.

 

Sadly, the most common animals hit by trains.  On something unrelated to this incident, I found some stats Network Rail has published a couple of years ago



"Deer" is shown as 350 (numerically) although without a time period for that number it's hard to judge.   Those makes with "*" are my guessed break down with gave an overall number of "others" and listed types under it in what looked like quantity order.  And, yes, I know swans are birds, but I think they separated them out.

 
Well, I saw a cloud formation once just like that, but can't remember where . . .

I suspect not a cruise ship because of the tacky window surround. A ferry somewhere?

 
Oh deer............

Cancellations to services at Castle Cary

Due to animals on the railway earlier today at Castle Cary the line towards Westbury is blocked.

Train services running through this station may be cancelled, delayed or revised. Disruption is expected until 12:00 17/10.

Customer Advice
-
What has happened?
-
A train struck a deer near Castle Cary and the line from Taunton to Westbury, Reading and London Paddington is blocked.

 

I was expecting to be pulled up on the "Spotsman" - the Scottish Mr Blobby ... even my spell checker baulked at it until I insisted ...

 

"THE" Flying Scotsman? - Oh dear you will be in trouble when someone sees that!