From a timetable obtained for a few shekels at Sheffield Park last Saturday

 
Looking at connection times out of its trains, the first four I checked, Devizes services would have been a distress purchase by then.

 

If Devizes wasn't clever .. here's the other route from Westbury via Patney & Chirton.  Fancy travelling from or to Lavington?

 
So, the early one aside, the sole morning eastbound train through Devizes waits at Devizes for 25 minutes, heads to Patney and arrives there two minutes after an all-stations connection to Reading leaves?

 

If you see pictures of Devizes station in this period, you see a single track through what was once a three platform station, the line snaking in over stubs of pointwork.  No-one was bothering with connections or generating traffic, by that point knowing that the axe was about to fall.

It's a common sort of pattern - two trains a day into Halwill from the north, with the second one arriving 10 minutes after the train headed towards Okehampton and Exeter had left.

 
I still have a copy of this particular timetable book and indeed had marvelled at the Lavington service. I did also do a first and last trip to Devizes in the last days. This involved the service that Mark highlights and I had intended to explore at Patney. It was however snowing heavily and about a foot deep. So a swift return to the train was sensible. I had to buy a separate ticket at Devizes for the trip to Patney and I still have a complete Edmonson Ordinary return ticket - Third Class.

 
Graham's 1965 timetable and people's reflections on the issues with it made me think: do we see the same practices in the current era, and to what extent?

That does prompt the question 'Current era?' - one measure would be 'Post 1997 and the arrival of the privatised railway' - an era that has seen strong growth for rail travel - a growth that in some cases wasn't anticipated in the way individual franchises were structured.

An alternative current era would be 'The Covid pandemic and after'.

Against a background of growth, what's not been seen is a wholesale shredding of infrastructure (Those photos of Devizes, 1965 and several other examples, not least the Great Central main line) - and the later smattering of irksome reductions such as Westbury's missing platform, or the Bradford junction north curve - these were pre-privatisation changes at a time when managed decline was still an anticipation.

Not so the Maindee curve, by Newport. Along with the buoyant services it carried, it was a victim of the new structure of the privatised railway, its singling will no doubt be quoted as a reason the railway cannot possibly reinstate the much-used services onto the Marches line from the west country and from Wiltshire.

https://www.branchline.uk/rail_chronology/Maindee-letter.pdf

Managing excess passenger flows using the timetable - in the west, with capacity on the network constrained by the shortfall in trains the railway's not at all averse to that and it's Weymouth that's the shining star in that dark firmament. The timetable's been habitually squatting on the potential for growth in passenger numbers to Weymouth - especially so since the loco-hauled stuff ended.


The underlying question must be 'How should the railway handle seasonal flows - and in a graceful manner?' The answer shouldn't be 'In July, deploy the winter minimum viable product' as business doesn't grow, and existing passengers suffer (hi, Cambrian Coast Line). Neither can it be a large strategic reserve of things on wheels that for most of the year do not turn them. Timetabling a summer-only higher capacity train but then very frequently turning it short of its branch line destination isn't exactly brilliant either (waves to Newquay).

I don't know the answer but in the West it would be good if the railway was in a position to step up and provide more for the journeys that, in a car, are awkward. Even on the major axes I'm rather missing the time when the GWR's marketing stated, albeit with a hyperbolic ambition 'With our new timetable we intend to empty the M4'.

 

Yes and no.  Some thinning out was undoubtedly right, but it was done with a zeal and a vigour that was excessive and we now regret.  There isn't the need for large arrays of sidings, run round loops, even platforms mouldering in minimal or no use that you can still see in some foreign parts with modern trains wiping through efficiently, with perhaps more trains now even than there were at the peak of the railway age.   

I remember catching a train from Manchester (where I was staying) to Stockport (where I was working) - a 158 as I recall, and being bemused to hear announcements that it was running to London (Waterloo) and calling at places like Bradford-on-Avon along the way. I'm not sure if it would have used the Maindee curve and/or the Rhubarb loop, but there is a logic in such a service popping into Newport and into Temple Meads for passengers to and from those hamlets, and to provide a single interchange station.   I do note that the 1965 timetable included various footnotes "Stapleton Road" for Bristol, telling me that some of the trains still skipped Temple Meads.


You have a conundrum.  Looking back at history, the old way was for commuter trains busy with flows of the working class into the big cities to be used for weekend and holiday flows out when people weren't at work.   See pictures of the annual works outing / holiday from Swindon to Weymouth and it's formed of trains that carried people on other days the rest of the year into Bristol, Gloucester, Swindon, etc.   But with the specialisation of trains, you can't do that these days.   The last "hurrah"s were the HST that ran to Weymouth on summer Saturdays

I can only dream of 12 car trains from Didcot into London being shortened to 8 cars in August, and 2 carriage train into Weymouth being increased to 6 carriages.  Can't couple a 387 to a 165.

And the change of the metrics so that "peak" is no longer peak is huge.  Trains that may have been carrying fresh air and a sprinkling of influential people into London on a Saturday are now almost as crammed as the rest in the summer anyway.   Good news that flow loadings are spread, but it does take out redeployment band wriggle room.

And so I head for Weymouth today. .  Whereas our through train from Swindon on a Sunday a decade ago arrived in Weymouth with five or even six carriages, these days it's down to three and running on a Saturday.  We at MTUG are trying to judge our promotion right to avoid overfilling the train;  we could do a lot more but that would be making trouble.  We did that once - in 2011 to prove that people from our little village of Melksham could be reached and persuaded.   

A single Facebook post - without being paid for - made 48 hours ago has been viewed 14,000 times.  Someone commented "I didn't know Melksham had a station". Someone said "that's expensive" at the £23 fare (before groupsave / railcard). Someone else asked "can I use the car park at the station - do I have to pay for that?".  It's a guess as to how many people will travel - as it is from Swindon and Chippenham. In some ways, I'm happy that the weather forecast suggests it's a traditional bank holiday of the sort we used to have - wet and windy - as that will put off enough people to make it manageable.