Rail at the Heart of a Green Transport Strategy 

Do you know that you can go to London from Westbury in two directions?

Go by train in an hour-and-a-half, with no nuisance of your car in London.

With a unique choice of Paddington in the west and Waterloo in the centre.

Westbury railway station is also ideal to be a parkway, to realise its potential.

A parkway concept is that people use cars or buses for the short journeys to main-line railway stations having large parking areas and coach pick-up, charged for in the price of an inclusive fare.    Westbury is on two main lines.

For it to be really used to resolve problems, the railway requires good access.

A western access road is a solution which would serve all needs.

Here is a further page on a brief return of steam at Westbury.

Since its great days, Britain's railway system has been treated shabbily.

Our railways have been cut up, cut down, messed with and under-resourced.

Public cash has been poured into road building and subsidising road transport.

There appears to be a discreet antipathy to railways amongst regional officials.

Yet we have read something to the effect that out of about a hundred delegates at the South West Regional Spatial Strategy Examination in Public, all but one supported improving our railways as the way forward for regional transport.

The exception seems to have been Wiltshire Council, talking up its road plans which made no attempt whatsoever to interface with Westbury railway station.

Railways are the obvious solution to our transport and environmental impasse. The infrastucture is in place.  Our railways need investment and better access.

This is obvious to most people viewing the big railway network at Westbury.

It also happens to be Wiltshire Council's official freight quality policy.

Here are some energy-efficiency statistics on forms of transport:

Average passenger kilometres per kWh energy units for railways: 120.

Average passenger kilometres per kWh energy units for cars and buses: 40.

There is not much between cars or buses, but railways are 3 times as efficient.

Wiltshire Council subsidises buses, but gives minimal money towards railways. Indifferent Conservative Wiltshire Council has withdrawn our Senior Railcards.

The Trans-Wilts rail line, via Warminster, Westbury, Melksham & Chippenham, parallels the choked A350 road (which Wiltshire County Council hoped to build series of bypasses along...) but the under-used railway is starved of support.