for Melksham's public transport usersTrains at Melksham, Swindon, Chippenham, Trowbridge, Westbury .......
and connections to over 2,500 stations in Great Britain for Melksham Public Transport Users -
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22.7.2020 - National Express Resumes next Monday 13.7.2020 - as from today, full services are back on all buses. Trains are slightly reduced. National Express coach still suspended. Public Transport capacity for joutneys to, from and within Melksham is expected to be good from next Monday and we suggest that it might be the time for you to start trying out a few local journeys. Please just avoid the late buses out of Bath on 17th and 18th July! |
Our mission is to maintain and enhance facilities at Melksham station, and to act as an independent voice of the station users.
Melksham is served by up to 18 trains a day on the line from Swindon to Westbury via Chippenham and Trowbridge.
Melksham Railway Station was closed in “the Beeching Era” - 1966. It re-opened in 1985, with British Rail, local councils and passengers partnering to bring back at least a part of the facility that had been so missed in the area.
The Melksham Railway Development Group (MRDG) was a community group that has worked hard over the years to support the station, though sometimes when the service was so poor it looked like it was lost again, and indeed if it weren’t for MRDG, Melksham might not have a station or train service today. Five years ago, MRDG working with the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership, persuaded Wiltshire Council to sponsor, the Department for Transport to fund and GWR to run a three year trial of addition trains, and they have been very successful – for the first time since its re-opening, Melksham now has sufficient trains for passenger numbers to have grown well, and although the group is still very much concerned with further development, it has been renamed the Melksham Rail User Group (MRUG)
Melksham Rail User Group runs on a small budget kindly funded by Melksham Town Council and Melksham Without Parish Councils, and our membership includes representatives of both organisations. Events such as the Santa trips are costed to break even - their main intent is to publicise and promote the station and trains that serve it; any profit made is ploughed back into group funds. All work done for "MRUG" by the members is on a voluntary basis, for which the group is grateful.
The Group is also a member of the TransWilts Community Rail Partnership, supporting the use and growth of local and regional passenger train services on the Swindon to Westbury line via Chippenham, Melksham and Trowbridge, with service on to Dilton Marsh, Warminster and Salisbury. It is also a 'friend' of the Association of Cimmunity Rail Partnerships (ACoRP).
Trains
Heading towards London until June 2024
Heading towards Southampton until June 2024
Rail User Group (West Wilts)
Online Forum (Great Western Coffee Shop)
Buses
Times - between towns
Times - town bus
Bus User Group (Option 24/7)
The Melksham [Rail / Transport] User Group and its predecessors have partnered with the train operators over the years to promote growth of services and their use. However, we are embarrassed to promote the current service with its awful reliability record. For regular users who are robust to the issues it is still useful - for newcomers there's a significant risk of their first planned use going wrong, quite apart from the worry beforehand of not knowing if it will run.
Four officers of the group met in December 2022, and we have decided on a hiatus until the spring. We'll maintain insurance and CRN membership; our annual Zoom account runs until mid-year and we will occasionally feed online media and deal with correspondence from it. In the meantime, we also recommend you to the groups linked above.
A new approach