I'm inviting someone from Swindon to Melksham on Friday evening, and I wrote:

"""If you catch the 18:42 from Swindon on Friday, which gets to Melksham at 19:08, we can pick you up and bring you to the meeting.  To return, the 21:48 bus to Chippenham - the last bus of the day - gets to Chippenham bus station at 22:05 (and connects on to the railway station for 22:14). The 23:04 train then gets you to Swindon at 23:17. ((You can see why towns like Melksham with a population of 24000 really need a decent train service - but this a particularly long wait at Chippenham.))  """

So that's an elapsed time of 26 minutes FROM Swindon and an elapsed time of 89 minutes back.   IF there was a good connection, the bus / train combo on the way back could be reduced to an hour (with a ten minute connection at Chippenham station which is the absolute minimum I would want) but it's still over twice as long on the "road".