On Friday, 7th July, the shadow spokesman for transport (Chris Grayling) and our own MP (Michael Ancram) will be visiting Melksham station at around 11 a.m. to lend their support to our campaign to retain appropriate train services to and through Melksham on the Swindon - Westbury - (Salisbury) - (Southampton) line.

Further details to follow

I don't know; it's very much 11:59 for them to come, but I'm going to shout about the visiti ahead of time / look to start to take advantage of increased interest and visibility within the next 48 hours.

Probably for their logistics.  Yes, I would have preferred it to have been a time when there was a service passing through, but that's merely a preference and I don't think it will make a huge difference that there's no train.  Almost makes a point if they get stuck on the road and have trouble finding the station ;-).  It's taken a while to set up at all, and I'm very grateful to them for coming. 

Finally I can confirm that I will be there, I will be coming by car though as I have other appoinments on the day and wont be able to hang around for the afternoon train!!

We're not going to have a huge gathering, but it will be an impressive one.

I've commented to some folks that I hoped to be able to serve teas and coffess ... we've done so in the past, but we cannot do so on this occasion - health and safeety reasons. My apologies; that's really a side issue anyway, and we can concentrate on the question in hand - an appropriate train service.

A Huge THANK YOU to Chris Grayling and Michael Ancram for coming along today and giving us their support.

They take to Westmister with them a view of a service that show much that's good in secondary rail services - a real success story that's had traffic rise 8 fold in 5 years to 109,000 journeys per annum, through towns such as Chippenham (44,000) and Melksham (24,000) which are set to grow by 30% in the next few years.

Chris spoke of all the money being spent on the Railway Industry through Network Rail, much on big "showcase" type projects, where at the same time the DfT are "cheesepairing" and trying to save a few quid here and there on short term cuts to services which are getting more viable not less year on year, and will be sorely missed in 5 years time if they're axed in 5 months time.   Problem is .... once you effectively scrap a service that's got 32 people per train riding, they'll melt away and NOT come back if you re-instate a year later.   Problem is ... if you re-align the track away from the platform to allow freight trains to go through faster, you'll not simply be able to restart the service anyway.   Chris also spoke of the excessive beauracracy involced in frachising and franchise admin with all the various companies involved, and how frankly impossible the civil servants who have to manage the system are finding it to do an effective job I may have paraphrased some of this badly ... will post up links to any other published comments later

More - MUCH more - to follow on the visit ...

P.S. Chris's message ... KEEP CAMPAIGNING ... all is not yet lost.

Good to see some people there, but how many of them have used Train Services from Melksham.

Here is an article on this from the Swindon Advertiser website.
http://www.thisiswiltshire.co.uk/news/headlines/display.var.835021.0.mps_back_rail_protest.php