Right, I am aiming to put together a letter/email to send out the local papers (Gazette & Herald, Wiltshire Times etc)... I will obviously detail the situation regarding the trans wilts route, and the lack of service to Melksham. I hope to also include a line regarding the Trains sat at Eastleigh gathering dust whilst we good paying travellers squash into smaller trains or lose out on cancelled services.

Does anyone else have any other Particular things that they feel should be mentioned?

Also, those from the Frome, Bristol areas and beyond... have you contacted your local press? The more noise we all make on the issue, the harder are calls are to ignore... and the more support we should gain.

Daniel

Tom Harris took over from Derek Twigg a few months back at the DfT.  It's hard to keep up sometimes!

There's a tendency for railway professionals to feel that they know better than their passengers (which is probably correct in most cases) and to use that as an exuse to not listen (which is, I believe, wrong). To their great credit, both FGW and Wessex Trains before them send representatives to local meetings such as the MRDG one here in Melksham last year and the year before, but DfT representation has been notable by its scarcity.  Again, I will give credit to the gentleman from GOSW who attended a meeting in Trowbridge in November for his courage in meeting such an agressive audience; what a pity that he rather confirmed to us that he was just a feeder through of local information and it was his job to "manage expectations".

I have made an open invite to DfT decision makers to meet with us on several occasions and haven't even received back an acknowledgment.  If one of them can take the time to leave Marsham Street and meet the users in our part of the world, they'll earn my huge respect even if they end up taking different views to ours, after listening to and giving them good consideration.

Thanks for that - I would be slightly surprised as I've seen evidence that the situation is getting better with some trains actually running as twin units, so the worst may be over.   And I have to say that the staff on the ground and in depot have been doing there very best to make that happen, even though they've naturally been at the forfront of passenger's frustrations!