13:13 Swindon to Westbury due 13:55

13:13 Swindon to Westbury due 13:55 will be cancelled.
This is due to a tree blocking the railway.

Wiltshire Council said a survey found about half the bus shelters in the county needed repair

Millions of pounds could be used to repair and replace bus shelters in Wiltshire.

Of the 4,000 bus stops in the county, 700-800 have a Wiltshire Council-owned bus shelter. The local authority said a survey found 51% of these needed repair or maintenance.

A contract tender worth between £6m to £8m will be issued at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, with the work expected to run from February for five years, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The funding for the programme of improvements would come from current and future government grants, the council said.

Wiltshire Council cabinet member for highways, councillor Martin Smith, said the repairs would "mark an important step towards improving the county's public transport infrastructure".

"Buses play a vital role in connecting our communities, and we know how important it is to provide high-quality bus shelters that meet the needs of local people," Mr Smith said.

"Many of our bus shelters need repair or replacement, and this contract will ensure we can deliver high-quality, accessible facilities that encourage more people to use public transport," he added.

Woodside

The current trend is to reduce Sundays to what is deliverable rather than add extra trains in, the following are cut on GWR on Sundays from the Dec timetable change:

07.37 Reading - Basingstoke
08.06 Basingstoke - Reading

Bristol Temple Meads to London services drop to hourly through the day, departing Bristol at 07.45, 09.00 then hourly to 14.00, an additional working at 14.30, then 15.00, hourly to 18.00, then every 90 minutes at 19.30, 21.00 and 22.28.

Extensions south west of Bristol are vastly reduced with Bridgwater and Highbridge losing their direct trains to London, services from Weston remain at 08.29 (09.00 Bristol), 11.31 (12.00 Bristol), 13.31 (14.00 Bristol) then a gap to 22.03 (22.28 Bristol).

From Paddington departures are 07.59, 09.00 (extends to Weston), 10.30 (extends to Weston), 11.30 then hourly to 17.30, then 18.30 (extends to Weston), 19.30, 20.30 (extends to Weston), 21.30, 22.15, 22.45 and 23.33.

Through trains between Cheltenham and London are further reduced from the existing 3 at 10.47, 15.00 and 17.00 to just a single working at 10.47, the other two workings terminating at Swindon.

There are additional 387 operated services in some hours between Paddington and Swindon.

Cuts on the B&H are the 14.36 Paddington - Exeter is deleted, 4 hour gap in service at Pewsey but Newbury, Westbury and Castle Cary added to the 15.03 Paddington - Penzance. The 18:36 Paddington - Plymouth terminates at Taunton with Dawlish and Teignmouth added to the 19.03 Paddington - Plymouth.

10.32 Paignton - Paddington deleted, stops added into the 08.10 Penzance - Paddington for Pewsey and Newbury and the 09.18 (re-timed to 09.09) Penzance - Paddington for Castle Cary and Westbury. The 19.15 Plymouth - Paddington is deleted.

Midsomer (Norton)

... stations ... immortalised by Flanders and Swann "Slow Train".

Driving test touts offer instructors £250 monthly kickbacks

Driving instructors are being offered kickbacks of up to £250 a month to sell their official test-booking login details to touts, a BBC investigation has found.

Touts use these login details to book driving tests in bulk and sell them to learners on WhatsApp and Facebook, charging as much as £500 for tests that should cost no more than £75. This makes it harder for learners to book through legitimate routes and adds to already lengthy waiting times.

The BBC has also uncovered evidence that the outgoing head of the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), Loveday Ryder, was told about these operations in February - yet some sellers reported to the DVSA are still operating. In response, the DVSA said it does not comment on specific complaints but has zero tolerance for those exploiting learner drivers.

We have identified touts operating in London, Birmingham, Manchester and the Home Counties. Posing as driving instructors, we approached them on WhatsApp and were offered monthly payments in exchange for login details to the DVSA's system, where instructors can book tests.

One tout boasted he worked with more than 1,000 instructors - while another, Anil Ahmed, who goes by the name "Ahadeen", said he signed up two instructors every week. We could not independently verify either of these claims. When we later confronted Mr Ahmed in person he denied any involvement, but we have found significant evidence implicating him.

The BBC has not been able to identify specific driving instructors selling their details but our conversations with these touts, the sheer volume of tests they are selling, and images of test-booking systems shared on WhatsApp suggest hundreds of rogue instructors might be involved.

Separately, 30 instructors we spoke to across Great Britain - England, Scotland and Wales - said they had heard of test slots being sold at huge mark-ups. Ten of them told us they had been approached by touts or had spoken to other instructors who had been.

At the end of October, 642,000 learners in Great Britain were waiting to take a test, with an average wait time of 21 weeks, DVSA data shows. There is a separate system in Northern Ireland.

Waits can be as long as six months, according to learners we spoke to - some say they are turning to touts out of desperation. A recent DVSA survey suggested about one in three learners had used "third parties" to book their driving tests.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander recently announced plans to change driving test rules, which it is hoped will stop touts and reduce the backlog. From the spring, only learners - not instructors - will be able to book test slots.

Instructors we spoke to welcomed the Department of Transport's (DfT) proposals, but also said they had been raising these issues for some time and now want to know whether the government will root out rogue teachers. Tests have been bulk-booked and resold for profit for years, but these instructors say it is now getting much worse.


(BBC article continues)

06:18 Hereford to London Paddington due 09:23 will no longer call at Honeybourne.
This is due to a fault on this train.
Last Updated:06/12/2025 06:50

Anorak Corner [National Rail edition]

It's time once again for the annual splurge of passenger data from across Britain's railway network, this batch covering the period April 2024 to March 2025.

Everything changed in 2022 when Crossrail opened, firing a purple bombshell that upended former norms and shook up the list of busiest stations. Any interchange between tube and Crossrail counts as entering or exiting a National Rail station so some mighty distortions are skewing the numbers.

The UK's ten busiest National Rail stations (2024/25) (with changes since 2023/24)
  1) -- Liverpool Street (98m)
  2) ↑2 Waterloo (70.4m)
  3) ↓1 Paddington (69.9m)
  4) ↓1 Tottenham Court Road (68m)
  5) ↑2 London Bridge (55m)
  6) -- Victoria (54m)
  7) ↓2 Stratford (51m)
  8) -- Farringdon (50m)
  9) -- Bond Street (43m)
10) -- Euston (40m)

Six of the top 10 are Crossrail stations, the arrival of purple trains having displaced the usual trio of Waterloo, London Bridge and Victoria from the summit. Liverpool Street retains the crown it snatched in 2022, its complement of commuters boosted by through services on the Elizabeth line. With 98 million passengers it's massively ahead of the rest of the pack and I suspect will be the UK's busiest station every year for the foreseeable future.

are Tfw allowed to run trains on Boxing Day and maybe Christmas day maybe in the high density population areas of South and West Wales area?

Hundreds of millions of pounds of government funding is to be spent on supporting bus services in the South and West of England.

The Department for Transport (DfT) said the money, to be rolled out between 2026 and 2029, would help local travel become more reliable.

Councils across the two regions will get a combined £139m in funding to help improve both the bus services themselves, as well as network infrastructure.

Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said a total of £3bn of funding being spent across the UK would "give local authorities the long-term funding they need to deliver lower fares, more frequent services, and the reliable transport that communities depend on".

The three-year funding commitment is designed to give councils the certainty to create longer-term plans around bus travel, rather than running on a year-by-year basis.

Local transport authorities (LTAs) in England will collectively receive almost £700 million in capital and revenue funding for bus services each year to FY2028/29 under a continuation of the multi-year Local Authority Bus Grant mechanism.

That continues the approach adopted in FY2025/26 and brings Bus Service Improvement Plan and local authority BSOG money into a single grant. The allocations can be spent by LTAs “however they want,” DfT says. That may include on lower fares, introducing new routes and zero-emission buses, or improving passenger infrastructure.

DfT notes how authorities have long been held back from making long-term investments in buses, “but multi-year settlements will finally give the much-needed certainty to develop and drive forward plans that cater to the needs of their communities.”

Announcement of the further allocations follows the Bus Services Act passing into law in October. That legislation gives LTAs “the power to run local services how they see fit and provides greater protection to socially necessary routes,” DfT notes.

Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander says that the money forms part of wider government plans to make public transport cheaper across England and sits alongside a freeze to regulated rail fares.

From FY2026/27 to FY2028/29, revenue funding allocated to LTAs is £1.44 billion, which sits alongside £820 million of capital money. FY2025/26 has already seen £467 million and £245 million for those streams, respectively, to give a total bus allocation from FY2025/26 to FY2028/29 of almost £3 billion. Individual location authority allocations can be found here.

Consolidation of all LTA bus funding in England into one pot will give greater control to local leaders to decide how buses are run, continuing what the government says is a commitment to ensuring that happens “for people, not profit.”

The Local Authority Bus Grant money is in addition to that provided via either the City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement (CRSTS) and its successor the Transport for City Regions (TCR) fund, or the Local Transport Grant.

[continues]

Cancellations to services between Penzance and Truro
Due to more trains than usual needing repairs at the same time between Penzance and Truro:
Train services running to and from these stations have been cancelled or revised. Disruption is expected until 08:00 06/12.
Customer Advice
Owing to a combination of train crew issues and the shortage of available carriages it is regretted that the first few services from Penzance will not operate this morning.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

There is a lot to be said for abolishing road tax for all vehicles, and putting an appropriate levy on all fuel types to truely reflect impact on infrastructure and the evironment.  The more your drive,the more you pay.  The more 'damaging' the vehicle, the more you pay.

Full disclosure, I have an economical and enviromentaly friendly van, and..... a 30 year old Land Rover defender.

From the point of view of most of us here, it might be something to do with the time and cost of getting there. 

(If indeed we even wanted to go).

Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image


A photo taken by a BBC North West Tonight reporter showed the bridge is undamaged

Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.

The tremor, which struck on Wednesday night, was felt across Lancashire and the southern Lake District.

Network Rail said it was made aware of the image which appeared to show major damage to Carlisle Bridge in Lancaster at 00:30 GMT and stopped rail services across the bridge while safety inspections were carried out.

A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.

Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to "think about the serious impact it could have" before creating or sharing hoax images.

"The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer," a spokesperson said. "It adds to the high workload of our frontline teams, who work extremely hard to keep the railway running smoothly," the spokesperson said. "The safety of rail passengers and staff is our number one priority and we will always take any safety concerns seriously."

The British Transport Police said it was "made aware" of the situation but there was no ongoing investigation into the incident.

Network Rail said 32 services including passenger and freight trains were delayed because of hoax.

A spokesperson for the rail provider said a mix of passenger and freight train would have been impacted. They said some of them would have been directly stopped or slowed while it checked the lines, but a lot of the trains were delayed as a result of earlier services still being in their path. The spokesperson said many of them would have been local but because of the length of the West Coast Main Line some trains were delayed as far north as Scotland.

Railway expert Tony Miles said due to the timing of the incident, very few passengers will have been impacted by the hoax as the services passing through at that time were primarily freight and sleeper trains. "They generally go slow so as not to disturb the passengers trying to sleep - this means they have a bit of leeway to go faster and make up time if they encounter a delay," he said. "It's more the fact that Network Rail will have had to mobilise a team to go and check the bridge which could impact their work for days."

He urged people to consider hoaxes like this could have on real people. "If they actually did delay a train it could have impacted someone who had to get to a medical appointment, or a flight or a funeral. It may seem like a game, but anyone who's thinking of doing this should consider how it will impact real people."

Yes the growing size of cars is a concern INHO. I consider that road tax should be based on dimensions or weight.
A substantial increase in fuel duty would also help.

Missed chances to save rail line teen, jury finds


Roxy Phillips was "blossoming" and "larger-than-life", a family friend said

Warning: The following story contains content some people might find upsetting

A drunken teenage girl was electrocuted on a railway line after police and Network Rail missed opportunities to prevent her death, an inquest jury has found.

Roxy Phillips, 15, fell on to the live rail in Weymouth, Dorset, while she was walking home at night with a friend in March 2023.

A member of the public reported trespassers on the line and the current was switched off, the inquest in Bournemouth heard.

However, the jury questioned actions by Dorset Police, British Transport Police and Network Rail which it said may have caused her death when power was restored.

The inquest heard that just before 01:00 GMT on 23 March, there was a 999 call reporting that two people had walked on to the railway line at Weymouth station.

Power was switched off and Dorset Police went to the scene.

Officers, who did not access the track, reported they could not see or hear anyone and no further search was undertaken.

Just under half an hour later the power was restored, the inquest heard.

A further 24 minutes after that, Ms Phillips' friend phoned 999 to report that she had fallen.

The location was near Redlands Sports Centre, nearly 3km (2 miles) from Weymouth station and about three-quarters of a km (half a mile) from her home in Broadwey.

Recording a conclusion of misadventure, the jury said alcohol was a probable cause of the tragedy while possible factors included the actions of police and emergency services.

It said Dorset Police failed to record reports of the trespassers' vulnerability, did not communicate fully with the other authorities and did not review the incident at a senior level once the track went live.

The jury questioned British Transport Police's "lack of command and control of the incident" and "sufficiency of inquiry... as to the extent of the search".

The force also did not record a request by Dorset Police to attend, it said.

For Network Rail, the jury highlighted "the adequacy of inquiries" about both the trespassers and the extent of the police search.

It concluded: "Roxy died as a result of consuming alcohol and trespassing on an electrified line.

"There were missed opportunities by Dorset Police, British Transport Police and Network Rail to locate Roxy or establish that she was no longer on the tracks before restoring power."

In statements, Network Rail said it would reflect on the inquest, while Dorset Police said it had already reviewed its response plans for railway incidents.

British Transport Police said it had changed its control room processes, strengthened the way it worked with local police forces and made the railway safer in the Weymouth and Upwey areas.

The inquest heard the teenager was excluded from school and had been due in court the day before she died on charges of assaulting paramedics and police.

A previous report by Pan-Dorset Safeguarding Children's Partnership said care authorities missed opportunities to intervene with the teenager.

Family friend Sasha Knott-Fancy previously told the BBC: "She really was a beautiful young lady. She was just blossoming. She was such a huge animal lover... a larger-than-life character."

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this story you can visit BBC Action Line.