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March 29, 2006
The Waiting Game
More than 3000 timetable inputs were received by 8th March, and First are working on them / consulting with other parties to get this stage completed by 27th April. Pressure on politicians still useful.
There's a circophany (Oops - spelling) of protest against some of the much more major cuts such as 8 trains gone daily on the Looe branch, and 5 x longer trains from Bedwyn to London cut - and there seems to be much more press interest in these bigger issues. Yes - they ARE important, but remaining services on those lines mean that victims of the proposed withdrawls would "only" have an hour or two to wait (maximum chance at Bedwyn - 48 minutes) whereas anyone planning to catch - say - the 09:12 from Melksham would have to wait until half past six in the evening.
I'm hoping that a strong case and a lot of inputs to the consultations from here mean that we will get an improvement rather than an excuse or an ignoring of our legitimate gripes / concerns - perhaps all the other bigger cost cases might even encourage First / DfT to let our case go through. But alhough I'm an optimist, I'm not counting on anything and I look also at "plan b".
Posted by gje at March 29, 2006 07:12 AM