|
Trains at Melksham, Swindon, Chippenham, Trowbridge, Westbury .......
and connections to over 2,500 stations in Great Britain
Buses ... local, and to Bath, Devizes, Chippenham, Trowbridge, Corsham and Bradford-on-Avon
And for newcomers to our public transport
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.
Commentary:
The train data works relatively well for local trains.
The bus data is stop by stop or route by route - neither of which quite is the quick, easy and pragmatic answer to a question like "where to I get the bus for Bath and what time does it get there". In some cases (such as to Bath) there are different routes within Melksham, and it's far from obvious when you find a stop offering services to Bath that there might be other services available just up the road. Route by route, sadly, means you have to look up the 271, 272, 273, x76 and UCB if you want to know about the complete service to Bath. Services that operate on a loop (most 271 journeys and some 14s) show a terminus and won't let you go on through in planning. It IS good but it's far from complete. And it just links you to the operator's website if you want to know what the journey will cost you.
Journeys that are indirect (involving changes on some or all journeys) are even more of a challenge - the best way is to put your start and end points into Google, or for a train journey into an online journey planner. Google comes up by default with driving instructions and there's an icon / button that lets you switch to public transport - usually pretty good in terms of giving you route ideas, but with an assumption that everything will be on time and that some mighty short connections can be made.
As an example, try https://www.google.com/search?q=melksham+to+calne
Top of this page
 
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.
Top of this page
|
