tehmina.org

On 12 June, I received the following response from Judith Shepherd of the DfT to my letter concerning the lack of services on the TransWilts (Salisbury - Westbury - Chippenham - Swindon) line. I was reliably informed that a large amount of the text of the letter was copied from DfT responses sent to concerned rail users last year before the actual cuts had been announced in the December 2006 timetable! It therefore, in large part, ignored the essence of my letter (for the desperate need for much better public transport links across Wiltshire), and did not even manage to respond with the most up-to-date standard statements on the issue. Graham Ellis of the Save the Train campaign has responded in detail to Ms Shepherd pointing out where the errors lie (take either sense of the word). We await a response. (more…)

Here is the reply from Alison Forster, Managing Director of First Great Western to my letter of concern regarding the decimation of the services provided on the TransWilts line. The reply is dated 17 May 2007. A superb bit of verbal engineering in the second paragraph. And also note that although my concern was for the communication route that links south and north Wiltshire, it is addressed as a Melksham issue (I am Salisbury-based).

Dear Tehmina

Thank you for your email. I appreciate that you are disappointed with the current timetable for Melksham.

The new timetable was based on the one specified in the Greater Western franchise bid. During the bid process and subsequently we made over 200 changes to the original draft proposals many of which came as a direct result of customer feedback in our consultation. (more…)