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I have had a look at www.savethetrain.org.uk. It makes our fight at Westenhanger seem a doddle.
 
Our situation is that for many years we only had a morning and evening peak service Monday to Friday. By putting a lot of pressure on the then franchise holder (Connex) we managed to get the station reopened full time with an hourly service 7 days a week.
 
Then 3 months after the station reopened, the SRA published proposals to drastically cut services to rural stations in Kent, taken on ticket sales. We were due to be cut to 6 a day with no weekend service again.
 
Luckily at the time Michael Howard (our MP) was The Leader of the Opposition and we got him to directly lobby the SRA. As things stand now we have been given a guaranteed minimum service level of 12 trains a day. Unfortunately Michael never managed to have this clarified. We still don’t know if that’s 12 trains every day or just Monday to Friday.
 
So we wait with trepidation for the publication of the winter timetable in December this year which we understand is a mini recast before the full recast in 2009 for the opening of the CTRL DS. Luckily I am a natural pessimist, so I am rarely disappointed. After all, its only Government policy to build another 30,000 houses in the Ashford area by 2015, so who wants a train service? People can go by bus, and I was told that at a Council meeting by our County Councillor only last month. Usual Tory joined up thinking that a commuter will pay a premium fare to travel in 37 mins from St Pancras to Ashford and will then happily leave the station and get on a bus to complete their journey. Madness.

I'm not sure that our fight DOES make Westenhanger look like "a doddle" ... I note that 3 MONTHS after a service increase, the SRA proposed cutting it back out again after considering figures that, surely, were from the days before the improvement.  Is it just me, or does it seem that the SRA behaved a bit like a spoilt child in the case of both Westenhanger and Melksham - a service that was improved by forces other than itself is snatched away again rather than being given a chance to prosper ... the DfT could do some real good by righting these wrongs ... expect that most of the Rail section staff were simply transfers over from the SRA, weren't they?