Currently on Saturdays, the 0705 Portsmouth-Cardiff service arrives in Westbury at 0858, thus providing a connection into the 0903 Westbury-Swindon service. However, from May 2010 the Portsmouth-Cardiff service will arrive in Westbury at 0900, which means that this will no longer be an official connection.

Passengers use this connection for a variety of journey purposes. Their numbers will include those travelling from Salisbury, Warminster and even as far afield as Portsmouth to our monthly Community Rail Partnership steering group meetings, which are held on a Saturday from 0930 at Well House Manor, Melksham.

Its not just passengers travelling to Melksham that will suffer. For example, with the current connection, passengers from stations such as Salisbury and Warminster travelling to Chippenham and Swindon can save 20-25 minutes on their overall journey time compared with changing at Bath.

The reason for the timing alteration is that as of May 2010, Network Rail have amended the Rules of the Plan (which govern the operation of the timetable), leading to effectively a 2 minute increase in running time between Warminster and Westbury to reflect the performance of the railway. Therefore the 0705 Portsmouth-Cardiff service will have a working time arrival at Westbury of 09.01 1/2 (public and working timetables differ.)

This means there would be only a 90 seconds real-time connection - made worse by the fact that the trains would be in platform 1 and platform 3 respectively at Westbury.

However, following discussions between us and First Great Western, they have agreed, from May 2010, to bid for the 0903 Westbury-Swindon service to depart at 0905, getting back into its current path by Thingley Jn. Subject to Network Rail validating the change, this will resolve the issue and restore the connection.

To me, this is a great example of how our CRP can work positively with the key players to resolve issues such as this. FGW didnt have to do that - but they did, and they deserve credit for that.

If you would like to join the growing group of TransWilts Community Rail Partnership volunteers, then please do register at http://www.twcrp.org.uk/ - We'd be very happy to have you on board.