As a former resident in Easterton, we lived just a mile from the main line railway. We could walk across the footpaths and watch the express trains headed for London and the West Country - but they were useless to us for travel purposes.

Central London was reached by car to Andover of Basingstoke and train into Waterloo; Pewsey occasionally. I travelled a very great deal for work - drove 30,000 miles a year, never took the bus and hardly even the train. Much of the milage was for work and with heavy equipment that meant my vehicle had to be a people carrier - were there a requirement to travel with that weight and bulk these days, it would still be via a big car. Even in Central London.

We moved to Melksham at the tail end of 1999. And there, too, we have experience of a railway station where the service was so scarse and unreliabe that it was frankly useless, improving somewhat to what remains too thin to meet more than a small proportion of needs - it has moved up from 3,000 to 70,000 journeys a year where it should be 350,000 to 450,000. Half a million in coming years with the growth of the town.

So - I started today to write a comment on whether a new Devizes Gateway station at Lydeway would "work". I have written from my own expertience heart, head and feet having lived within a mile of that stretch of railway for 15 years.

Heart - the emotional desire for it to happen
Head - real thoughts as to what it might do and where the issued would be
Feet - actual travel experience living less than a mile from the line in question and what we did with no station

Times changed, and the need for heavy equipment reduced. Running IT courses, we moved from a Sun or Silicon Graphics workstation shared between two delegates, to a workstation for each delegate. They shrank into laptops, which became in time a fleet of A4 sized machines that could pack for travel into a paper box, alternating for passing between the training note sets that our delegates worked to. And towards the end of my training career, we had moved to a position where most delegates preferred to use their own laptops, and I carried only a limited number of our company machines which became "just in case" adjuncts and were rarely used.

Towards the end of my training career, I was "training" much more. After 15 years living in Easterton, we moved to Melksham; we purchased a listed building in uninhabitable condition on 11th August 1999, standing outside our new home as we watched the total eclipse, the rooks calling concerned at the unexpected nighttime, and we were both excited and wondering what we had done. And we moved in on 24th December - "must be in for Christmas", with the only room practical as our bedroom (safe floor) was on the third floor (fourth for any USA readers), and the only loo and leccy were on the ground floor, with a string of multiways. I digress.

From Melksham, standard station run was "Kiss and Ride" via Chippenham, second choice Westbury, third choice Trowbridge. And as there came to be less need for carrying beyond the capacity of what I could manage without a car, it became the preferred way to travel. Yes, I enjoyed open road driving but fighting jams all the way to Cambridge was not "Open Road" and it was tiring. As course tutor, the teacher had to be there for 08:30 or 09:30 depending on what time we started, and that was of critical importance. With Chippenham to London fares at peak times being high, and with our fixed expenses quotations, it was logical to travel up on a Sunday afternoon / evening, stay the night (easy to find somewhere cheap and cheerless near Paddington, even for London) and then be fresh to teach. In those early days in Melksham, never the station there. Too few trains, not at the right time, and nothing to fall back on if they failed. The 22:16 bus from Chippenham Station was an excellent way home at the end of the course - saving Lisa the drive out late at night, though on many trips it left before the 22:11 train arrived.

I used Melksham Station - err - when I could; from 2001 to 2006 there was a very thin service but it did work for inbound customers. Where just one person needed a course, they came to us and we would pick them up on the evening before and drop them off at their B&B. Courses finished in time for them to catch the 17:00 homewards. Come 2007, the 17:00 gone and a service at either 19:50 (or 07:20 the next morning) and it became pickups from Chippenham and lifts back there. Our customer base - even 20 years ago - tended to be [environmentally aware / green] and a surprising number - around a half - arrived and left by public transport.

By 2014 when our service stepped back up from useless to useable though still thin, we reverted to offering pickups / dropoffs almost-only at Melksham Station and it worked well, though by that time I was spending far more time on site training and far less time in our Melksham base. That was because we were ahead of the curve; our initially-niche topics like Perl, PHP MySQL and Python which no-one saw a training market for when we set up had become much more mainstream, and rather than our delegates being the one odd-bod at large organisations, the technology was being so useful that it was adopted by larger teams.

And so - having stepped the service back up - my own business use grew dramatically (bolstered by the need to carry less explained earlier) and the use by our trainee customers faded a little. In 2006, we had taken over a former B&B for delegates and our public courses had become largely residential; it worked for the delegates and it worked for us, but it gave us a resource that needed to pay its way or at least break even, and rooms that were only used be delegates for perhaps have the time weren't cost effective. And we were being asked "can we stay - we work at a business locally" and "My son and daughter-in-law live in Melksham and we're coming to visit them - but they have been breeding and don't have any spare rooms now". And so we were moved to accept more general hotel bookings. These customers were - if I characterise - less "public transport aware". It was rare for them to arrive in anything but a private car, or to go out anywhere other that in their own car or a taxi (and ah, there in another tangent I will avoid.

Business journeys WERE able to start from Melksham again, and did so. I reckon my travel miles didn't change much but my car driving miles slashed from 30,000 to 3,000 a year to far less than that now. And 27,000 miles at an average of 45 m.p.h. is 600 hours a year. Roads around Easterton, Devizes, Melksham are not renowned for high speed. I got to be very much part of The Archers' community, listening on my way home - and indeed had done so from perhaps 1980 when we moved to Chippenham to cover a sales territory described as the South West (Shrivenham to Penzance!). At current prices - £9 per gallon, and 30 miles per gallon - a thousand gallons a year, £9,000 on fuel alone. And that's before registration, insurance, serving including oils, tyres and parts, and depreciation. Tutor needs to turn up in a decent vehicle, so an old banger won't do; we did try a retired London Taxi as a "character" vehicle we could get away with, but it turned out to have been retired because it was knackered. Some wonderful stories to tell, but I got to know the AA man in Dublin very well, and it was exhausting to drive over long distances.

So since 2014, my use of Melksham Station has been much more personal business and much less by persons using my business - which in any case we retired just pre-covid. My very first outbound - at the end of the day the trial service of 8 trains each way per day started - was to Thun, via Harwich, Hoek van Holland and an Interrail pass - to teach Lua, would you believe? And other notable destinations have include not only those near stations (and a wide range, from Bow Brickhill to Farnborough Main, Kirkhill and Waterbeach) but on occasions by onward bus - no other way, these days, to Ashby-de-la-Zouch or St Asaph.

I started writing - oops - several hours ago - in giving follow up examples for the post about Devizes Gateway, potential traffic there, how it might be abstractive, whether it would be used, how it might effect the buses. I fear my example and experiences quoted, though we once live in what would be it's catchment, is a bit of an unusual one and whilst it may be taken as a learning and study case, it cannot be multiplied up to give a valid lesson. (post is here)

That post does mention buses. I have, so far, only done so tangentially in these ramblings. Would a Devizes Gateway station impact on bus use in the Devizes area? Now THERE is an interesting question!

Trains are typically medium distance and upwards uses. Buses are much more local? When we had a training centre and indeed a hotel I cannot recall any guests or delegates checking in after a bus journey to reach us. I can recall many hotel leisure guests asking us about Park and Ride for Bath which they wanted to visit while in the area, and the way they often needed to be convinced to leave their car on our drive and take the bus from outside - "no point in you driving to catch a bus when one goes direct from here!".

I contend that buses and trains are much more complementary than competitive - born out by evidence of where people go using each of the transport types. However, there is very much a need to link up and connect. There are 100 places you can board a bus in the Melksham area, and there is just one station platform. For this public transport to work well as an attractive total journey for people, connections need to work between the two modes physically (bus stops and railway platforms close by each other), time wise (routinely providing good and reliable connections throughout appropriately frequent service) and organised passenger friendly way (combined information and ticketing offered, without each having their own complex and daunting rule set, and a get-you-there guarantee and not a leave-you-stranded scenario if something goes wrong). Provide those criteria are met then, yes, there's every best chance of Devizes Gateway, and a new township around it, being a roaring success.

The Network Rail feasbility strudy from "Restore your railway" from which the top image is taken is mirrored at https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/mirror/Devizes-Gateway-Interim-Feasibility-Study.pdf. Note that a lot can change in 3 years - although the project needs to look forward 40 years plus!