This month and newx, the Department for Transport are deciding on who to award the Greater Western Franchise, including with it the "honour" of providing us with an inappropriate and slashed service.    The award is scheduled to me made on 21st December, but it's said that the actual decision will have been made 3 weeks earlier to allow time for papers to be drawn up for a grand award / signing.

I spend much of last weekend writing to people involved in the decision (as best as I could identify them), updaing the information they have on the Swindon to Southamton service, with a Melksham bias.  There's been a substantive rise in ticket sales in the last year (and the new figures wouldn't have been available at the time the invitation to tender was put together).  Wilts County Council designated the route as one they wish to develop (and that was at a time the tender invite was being drawn up, so it couldn't have been considered) and a number of other matters that mean that the old information the suggested service based on is already hopelessly out of date and negative.

Actually, I'm heartened by references in minutes of meetings published under Freedom of Information to the abiity for the franchise to be amended - it confirms what I suspect that there IS such a mechanism built in;  I suggest we work to make sure that decision makers are well informed of all the new positives (and that they know that the figures are new, so that they won't be changing a decision but rather updaing one.   And at the same time we work to help publicise the current service so that there's even MORE positive support.