Rail travel in Melksham could get a boost from a new train operator proposing a significant addition to the rail timetable from summer 2020.
The proposal from GO-OP – an independent co-operative society – will bring an additional six services a day to the town, which GO-OP say will ‘make a total of 25 departures a day from Melksham, close to an hourly service’.
The service will connect Melksham to the West Midlands, with the service going as far as Nuneaton, via Oxford, Leamington Spa and Coventry. The service will also connect the town with Somerset, stopping in places like Frome, Castle Cary, Taunton and Yeovil.
Graham Ellis from Melksham Rail User Group commented, “There’s little doubt that Go-op have done excellent work in identifying holes in current train service provision, where additional train services would be really useful.
“An hourly service is exactly what Melksham needs. Alternate Southampton to Swindon and Taunton to Oxford trains making up that service would be excellent. It would, I believe, more than double the number of passengers using Melksham Station.
“The capacity of the railway through Melksham is limited, as it is on other parts of Go-op’s planned route. With additional GWR mainline trains from December, our existing local services are already being compromised from this December. It’s not clear yet how the extra train paths for Go-op could be found through better use of existing tracks, or whether enhancement such as re-doubling part of the line would be needed.”
GO-OP has been working on its plans for several years and had announced in 2016 that it hoped to gradually introduce the new services from 2017. Alex Lawrie, the operations director and a founder member of GO-OP said, “We’ve had a couple of false starts and have realised that perhaps we weren’t as well prepared as we thought. The technical difficulties are hard to overstate. The UK railways are – for good reason – carefully regulated and we must prove in great detail that our ideas stack up. But we learn and we move on. This is a new submission and we think that this is the one!
“We are holding a public meeting in Frome on Thursday 4th April. We’d encourage anyone who’d like to find out more to come to these events, or visit www.go-op.coop for more information. This is just the start – we need to start planning bus services to bring people to the stations, and consider how we can further develop and enhance the service. Anyone in the area we serve can be part of the conversation.”
The meeting will take place at 5pm – 6.30pm. The venue is to be confirmed, please check the GO-OP website for updates: www.go-op.coop
