Newsletter

Friends of Bruton Railway Station-Annual General Meeting, 22 November: some main points

Our active membership is now 12; two new members joined during the year, one a regular traveller to Bristol who will be able to keep us up to date on how the service is actually performing, the other a staff member of Sustrans whose current role there is the promotion of car-free walks, hence the walking web site included on our Useful Links page. This emphasises the possibility of getting to the starting point for good walks by train or bus, not car.
We have maintained regular attendance at the quarterly meetings of the Community Rail Working Party, practically always attended by the General Manager of First Great Western (FGW) and a senior representative of Network Rail. We are thus well placed to lobby for improved services and raise concerns when anything goes wrong.
The Community Rail Partnership, under which our quarterly meeting operates, has been given ‘Designated’ status by the Department of Transport, giving the partnership and groups like ours more standing with the government when it comes to speaking up on behalf of our local area. In recognition of this a train on our line bears the name of the Heart of Wessex Line Partnership.
We are the first point of contact for the Bruton Town Council if there is any difficulty at the station, so we were appealed to for advice when the station lights failed one night in June and were able to get immediate help from FGW at Westbury before the next night. We also contributed to a successful campaign, spearheaded by Catherine Phillips our Rail Partnership Officer and champion of all the station support groups, when Network Rail announced they were closing off the back gate to the station to prevent trespass and enhance safety. We were able to demonstrate, by means of a questionnaire, that nearly a third of Bruton's population found that that gate gave them shorter access to the station by as much as half a mile if they had to walk to it, and Network Rail decided the threat that had concerned them was not as serious as they had first thought. We hope they will continue to feel this way.
We are very hopeful that new rail franchises to be issued in 2013 will be for at least ten years, giving the franchise holders a worthwhile prospect of investing in new trains, our current main line trains, albeit well maintained and recently refurbished, being up to 40 years old.

Our web site, now 18 months old it its present form

We created our own free-standing web site in July 2010, so it has now been running for 18 months. During 2010 the number of ‘hits’ per quarter was successively 600, 850, 2500 and 2300 (to 9 December). Some visits are from the local area but the vast majority are from all over the UK. About 5% are from countries world-wide, not just western Europe but also the US and Canada, Brazil, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Egypt and many more. Perhaps the most unlikely city yet: Irkutsk in Siberia. We now have a feedback page, which brought important contributions to our campaign over the station gate and should in future help us to shape the site better to meet people’s needs.