One benefit of being laid up with a heavy cold and being kept awake with frequent coughing fits! 

 
According to this article, the station is now in it's final stages of construction and still on course for opening this autumn.
https://www.networkrailmediacentre.co.uk/news/community-invited-to-drop-in-event-as-bristol-brabazon-station-enters-final-stages-of-construction

The actual opening date of Ashley Down station back in September 2024 was only announced about 3 weeks in advance.  So still a chance Bristol Brabazon will actually open this autumn and not during the winter(December to February) period.  My guess is sometime during November.

 
A graphic ...

 
Many thanks for documenting that, Bob - a really interesting study. Real Time trains confirms 14 trains through Melksham in the 6 hours between midnight and 6 a.m.  Of those, 11 were signifinatly late.



The "dance" can be done in some places - for example, with St Erth to St Ives where the trains are guaranteed to turn up on time, or in a pattern of lateness if one is late, the next presents late.  That requires some exceptional action, such as the notice at St Erth that tells you that the St Ives train won't usually wait, and at St Ives where it's the same train and it automatically synchronises.  It is - utterly - out of the practical question in Wiltshire where train passing the ends of the single line need to be combed in, and the trains that use the single line need to present exactly at a convenient time irrespective of delays getting there, and then to be able to escape it at the far end.

Multiple solutions options to increase practical, relaible capacity have been mooted.  For more than a very modest further traffic increase, at least one of them and probably more need to be implemented.  And of those multiple solutions, to be implemented, a number of them are not on that single track section from last point at Thingley to the first point at Bradford.

 
Left 29 minutes late at 14:47.  At least it is running.

 

 

Excellent point - it will make those last trains home slightly easier to catch

 

One of the fixed ideas behind privatisation was that BR was run, by engineering and operations, for its own benefit and convenience not the passengers'. I remember hearing one of the privatisers explaining at the time that they had designed the process with minimal barriers to entry (capital both as money and owning equipment), so a group of outsiders could bid for a franchise.

The idea was to bring in people from a retail background, where (it is said) the customer is king and always right. The switch to "customer" was meant to reflect this change of ethos of those running the TOCs, which should  start to recognise that they were customer-facing.

Of course that totally misses some important differences. With competent logistics (which you can hire in) to maintain stock levels, you can retail stuff out of your stock room that was manufactured ages ago. It stays as made, with no involvement of the manufacturers until it's been bought and taken (or sent) home.

You can't retail a rail journey that way. You have to keep manufacturing the journey after it's been sold, and while it's going on, until it has finally been consumed. So the manufacturing staff (both engineering and operations) need to be involved throughout. This makes life more difficult, but can't be wished out of relevance.

 
I guess that freight ceasing in 1966 applied to other stations on the DN & S, and Churn just happened to be included. There might have been some agricultural traffic, though in 1943 a siding installed for the benefit of Churn Farm was removed as part of the wartime doubling. C W Judge in An Historical Survey ... of the line says that the station was closed to goods traffic then.

In the past fifty years I've explored most of the line between Upton and Winchester, but for some reason not the bit between Upton and Didcot - until yesterday. It's now a well-surfaced path for cyclists, walkers and horse-riders.  One or two stretches of embankment have been reduced to allow sloping access paths, there are several bridges to peer over and the concrete base of what I guess may have been a platelayers' hut.

 
OK, I'll bite. The APT was failed by a country that was in fundamentally unserious mode concerning the train and I suspect that many other aspects of railway travel benefitted from the research that produced it. Also, to engineer that tilt mechanism in a purely analogue way. If the trains running on the GWML now were a descendent of the ATP I suspect that everyone would be rather happier with the ambience of the passenger compartments than they are.

Mark

 

Unfortunate timing with Trump reviewing the situation with the Falklands, followed by the Argentinians rising to the bait.

 
Should this be titled like the recent awards; Ignoble failures?

 
An unusual set of circumstances led to some extended delays around the single line overnight.

Both sleeper services were routed via Melksham and both were running late.   The Up sleeper lost half an hour coming through Cornwall while the Down service was delayed by 50 minutes due to an incident east of Swindon.   The pair usually cross in Somerset.   This morning it was between Trowbridge and Westbury.



However behind the westbound sleeper was a queue of trains at Chippenham waiting for the single line to clear.   A couple of them had been allowed to run early at previous points in their journey.  The closure of the line through Chipping Sodbury for overnight engineering work also added to the pressure.  The second in the queue was just waiting for the one in front to take the single line before it could continue towards Bath Spa.



The up sleeper was delayed on the approach to Bradford Junction for 45 minutes while a pair of trains used the single line.  The message on Journeycheck suggested it had been delayed by a late running train in front.   I suppose it was - by the down sleeper!



In all it took nearly three hours for the congestion to clear as other trains joined the queues at both ends.   The worst delay I have seen was a freight train which approached Chippenham 12 minutes early but was 83 minutes late by the time it got to Trowbridge.

In the middle of the night perhaps it doesn't matter so much - but it shows what a knife-edge capacity along the single line is on at times.

 
I can't see Imber being returned to civilian habitation as it remains a useful training facility, although, ironically, the army had to construct the nearby "village" on Copehill Down (complete with railway siding and vehicles) to better replicate the sort of buildings, including cellars, that the British Army might have to fight in in Europe).

(And something would need to be done about the poor mobile-phone reception!)

In recent years I've become conscious of the increased use of the central ranges north of Larkhill.  (Imber is in the western ranges.)  Time was when one could go there on a Sunday and be reasonably sure that they were not being used and one could access the rights-of-way.  But on several occasions in the past few years the Salisbury Plain Training Area website has shown no artillery firing taking place, only for me to drive down and find the red flags were up and there were army vehicles whizzing around.  A year or two ago the flags were down, so I trudged up the old Salisbury-Devizes road for two miles from Bustard, only to find a barrier was down across it.

Recently the SPTA website has tweaked its guidance, but still does not indicate military use other than firing.

No doubt one might be fairly safe in assuming that the army takes Christmas Day and adjacent dates off, but on most winter days the Plain is not particularly inviting.

 
As has been said… frequently. 

 

Very, very close - you are just two stations along the line.  At Langogne we stopped for a crew change, then at  La-Bastide-St-Laurent-les-Bains to pass the train coming the other way.

Here is La Bastide:

 

This worries me. Not the re-opening of Imber which (if any senior politicians or cool servants have been up there on the 23A) has well connected public transport and housing and a church that could be brought up to modern standards to form the hub of a new town. But also with political decisions taking the opportunism of short(er) term money saving even in a sphere they are apparently committed too.   Could money be saved by mothballing the Badminton and Langport cutoffs, with London to the West and South Wales routed via Gloucester, via Bath Spa, and via Honiton?

 

Indeed - we had a regular train service from Swindon to Westbury from December 2006 to December 2013 - it ran about every 12 hours.  It has improved since then, but to this day we remain in search of a frequent service, for example as suggested by the Bath and Wiltshire Metro which would run every 30 minutes, though perhaps not completely regular because there might be a gap from 00:30 to 04:30 midweek.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel

There have been some noble (and nit so noble) failures in the railway world, and some of them are associated with great engineers who had other magnificnent successes but these cases results were not as planned:

Leader
Drumm Electric Train
Bideford, Westward Ho! and Appledore
4DD trains
Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway
Advanced Passenger Train
Waterloo and Whitehall Railway
Class 769 trains
Brill Branch
Cardiff Railway (Treforest)

 

…and staying on topic, there is regular coffee.   

 

Normally it’s to get money out of the people paying using airline points for their ticket. So the ticket price of $376 is what you pay for with the points, then on top of that you have to pay the surcharge in cash. So essentially with the points you’re getting a 30% discount, which to my mind makes the points less attractive than if you can pay for the whole thing in points. There is something on BA in Europe where you can essentially pay for most of it in points.

 
Actually, having been encouraged by two of my fellow admins here on the Coffee Shop forum, I'm now inclined to inflict offer you another YouTube clip, in support of my ongoing campaign to recognize Richard Trevithick as the earlier inventor of railway steam locomotives.

From YouTube, see https://youtube.com/shorts/miwshkCqxHU?is=_g_LdAXh3gqjiZFt - and sorry if it's portrait rather than landscape format (or vice versa) - but that's just how it is on YouTube.

CfN.

 
From the BBC:


Imber could be re-opened, then? 

 
Easy for you to pronounce, stuving. 

 

There's also the "Pictish symbol signs"! I think that station is La-Bastide-St-Laurent-les-Bains.