Paul, it would indeed take a miracle to recover a sensible service from this December. I'm sure you've read of growing ticket sales, and of other signs of steadily increasing business - 8 people on the platform waiting for the train and 5 got off the other day when the 17:02 did run, just one or two short of 50 on the late afternoon Saturday train that's being withdrawn, and 42 on the very early train into Swindon.  These figures are dramatically up year on year, but alas the government / DfT decision was taken based on figures that are now around 3 or 4 years out of date and a grown forecast of 0.8% which no-one can explain to us. 

To give you an idea as to how much a difference a grown rate makes over a few years, I've taken the 3,000 ticket sale level from 6 years ago and applie 0.8% traffic growth - it comes out to 3146 ticket sales 6 years later.   The actual experience on the ground shows growth from 3,000 to over 27,000 ticket sales (and 109,000 journeys on the line).  Any government decision based on 3150 units sold when the real number sold in 27,000 is going to be questionable at best, and probably wrong, and that's what you see in this case. 

The government's poor decision left a wonderful opening for the Train Operating Company to go round with their begging bowl to county and other councils and demand "pay us or we'll just provide the inapproapiate minimum service" and in the case of Wiltshire, alas, their bluff was called.  Wilts did make some efforts to push the DfT on the matter, but the DfT were less than helpful, ignoring correspondence for months (and, conveniently, until after decisions had been made) ... so we end up with a game played by the people this country has elected and their officials, and it's the electors who end up shafted.

As a business, some 40% of our customers have arrived by train - indeed, at least 3 of the 7 arriving today are arriving in the area by rail.  But we will not (and can not) let our business suffer due to the shocking reliability issues, nor due to the withdrawal of every single train that's commonly been used by our delegates.  With changing times, every business needs to move forward, adapt, adopt (First should be moving to a 2-hourly Oxford to Southampton service in December).  We've taken a complete look at our customer base / Melksham / business model and just introduced radical changes to our product that are showing every sign of increasing our customer satisfaction and our business, with very very few cases of people prefering the old product which we continue to offer, except for the convenient train access. 

Link: off-topic details and hotel web site

So, Paul, don't be sorry for me personally - this was always going to be a tough fight and I entered it without any illusions that we were likely to succeed.  We HAVE, though, brought considerable light to bear on the case and we are still talking about a sensible outcome from December 2007.  Another battle?   Perhaps; I suspect that there's an element of the current "league against TransWilts trains" who have intentionally moved the war on a year to help them win thsi year's battle and are hoping for a weakened team on the opposite side in early 2007.

We live in interesting times!