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February 27, 2006
Roger Jones answers 5 months later!
I have just received a response to my letter of 2nd October 2005 to Roger Jones at the Department for Transport. Full Text of letter.
You may recall that five month ago there were three companies bidding to run the train service on our line, and each of them was looking to provide a good bid to meet both what the Department for Transport wanted and also to consider the views of local opinion; in a competitive situation, they were obliged - at least to some extent - to take into account local inputs and feelings, and we were busy writing to Narional Express, to Stagecoach, and to First.
We've got a rather different situation now. To be fair, Mr Jones has updated his answer to reflect the last five months of activity ... but I'm stopping short of calling it an "answer", for to do so would imply that it substantively answered by questions.
Mr Jones is, at least, straightforward enough to tell me that it's a minister's decision to "can" the service (a pleasant change from DfT pointing to First and First pointing to the DfT). However, there is still no answer what so ever on what they consider to be "low" traffic levels, on which year's figures they used (important on a line that has grown by a factor of 8 TIMES in 5 years, or on any of the studies and reports that formed the background to their decision. Perhaps no-one looked at any figures, then ... perhaps the decision was taken purely because some guy at the SRA hadn't heard of Melksham ...
Posted by gje at February 27, 2006 06:10 PM