Thetownend.com

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-12832259

Going to double the track all the way on this line by 2014. Hopefully will mean more trains travelling north from Swindon? On a saturday theyve only been able to have trains leaving Swindon at 7am and 9am because of the single track, which is a pain for an away day because one is too early and the other too late. Good news.

Good news indeed, but why did they single it in the first place.  False economy I guess.  My early days of following the Town involved a train ride along the double track from Minety!

Just typical underinvestment in public transport in our area.

I think it took a lot of campaigning to get this decision, which is rediculous when you consider it is the Cheltenham/Gloucester area's route to London and that it is an ideal back up route for the South Wales Line and Severn tunnel.

Good news for our Gloucestershire contingent as well.

I wonder whether this increases the business case for a suburban station in NW Swindon?  Quite surprising that a town of Swindon's size and railway history only has one train station.  There are 6 in Reading, with a 7th on the drawing board.

We're not Reading. Get over it.

I don't think any of our lot who have been watching since before 1995 will ever get over them having overtaken us.  Some things just aren't right and never will be.

In the recent past, there has been talk about re-opening a station at Wootton Bassett. Purton used to have a station and of course Cricklade was on the M and SWJR along with Chiseldon and Ogbourne St George.  Stratton used to have its very own Halt and Highworth its own branch.  If only planners had some foresight and realised how useful keeping these links could have become for the Town.

Cirencester used to have two stations. Then some dick decided it was best served by some village in the arse end of nowhere (Kemble). Thanks a lot Beeching

Blunsdon as well

I think the roads in North Swindon are shite. The planning is pure fuckwittery as normal for Swindon.

Wiltshire council have to dump some more housing somewhere in North Wilts and it looks like they will do it right on SBC's doorstep in the fields between Common Platt/Sparcells and Purton. If they do that I cant imagine how long it will take to drive into town from those new houses. 45 mins+ ? So if that development goes ahead, yes there would be call for a station up there. But as Reg says, Bassett has to be the biggest priority for a station at the moment?

I grew up in the neighbouring village of Oaksey (wouldn't describe the area of the arse end of nowhere) and quite a few lads used to follow Swindon Town from there in the 1980's and early 1990's. There is room on the line for 2 tracks but the other was pulled up following the Beeching cuts. Villages such as Oaksey & Minety had their own stations and older Town fans recalled catching trains to Swindon for football in the 60's. Don't forget that a good proportion of our supporter base comes from outside of Swindon itself.

I am sure a Bassett station would be a success.  Obvious candidate.

Regarding the roads in N Swindon, one of the reasons that infrastructure in that area is so poor is that it's incomplete.  There were well documented plans in the early 1990s (ie when N Swindon was being planned) for Thamesdown Drive to loop continuously all the way from Groundwell to the Transfer Bridges.  Only half of the route was ever built; the section from where the dual carriageway currently ends just north of Sparcells to Transfer Bridges would have paralleled the Swindon-Kemble line.  Getting in to town from that area by road remains a real bind.  All the more reason to build the train station, maybe.

I didnt realise that was the plan, but that would have made sense. Another SBC sickener that they gave the developers back £4m earmarked for roads even though they have not fulfilled their promises and created suburban gridlock at rush hour.

Its a joke that there are signs for Cirencester at the roundabout with the Porsche garage on it at the bottom of Mead way. How long does it take to get onto the A419 from that roundabout with all the lights on Thamesdown drive? 20 mins? Its a joke.

Swindon needs to stop being shafted by developers. Although as I said, SBC are now not in control of what happens in NW Swindon because they have built up to their boundaries with North Wilts. 

Wasn't that some of the thinking on the Shaw Tip site for the ground a few years ago that it would link into and justify that last part of the link road

Dont think so, Shaw Tip is the other side of the rail line?

Nope, Shaw Tip is sandwiched right between Mead Way and the rail line.

Oh wait, I re-read and see what you mean now. Yes, the theoretical link road would be the other side of the railway line than the Shaw Tip site.

I thought when the whole Shaw Tip site was first proposed there was talk about improving the access with the Sports Village etc and putting a new dual carriageway to come out on Great Western Way by B&Q. I am sure the council at the time would have loved to have got a new ground development to fund this. Remember the big press conference when it was first muted and how much the Council were on board

Had a good mate from Oaksey. Do you know the McNaught-Davis family?

Do you mean Gavin, used to play a lot of football with him when he was younger. We were both a Oaksey playing for the Reserves and Oaksey had a kid playing for the U14's called Charlie Griffin. Didn't come to much!

Yes Gavin. Was in his class at secondary school. Also played a bit of Ciren league footy with him a few years later. Lost touch after he got married to Paula (who was also in our class at school).

Anyway I digress. Didn't realise Griffin was an Oaksey FC alumni. Was he much better than anyone else at that age? I often wonder what happened to a guy called Steve Tucker, he was head and shoulders above everyone at U/16 Ciren Town level. Didn't make it though, not sure how far he got.

Erm, anyway I've derailed the thread now (pun intended)

He was pretty good, confident (even a bit cocky but a good kid) and scored shedloads of goals and was on the books at Bristol Rovers who didn't take him on. Once saved a couple of pens from him in penalty competition when he was 14 (I was 19 or 20) Went onto Chippenham and went on from there

in hindsight the closure of the railways all over the nation has been a terrible mistake.

batch,i played against steve tucker numerous times.both on saturdays and sundays.
 cricklade and purton on saturdays,and on sundays he played for akers garage.
dunno who he plays for now as i aint played for 6 years.
he wasn't all that imo.

Even Stratton had a station.......can anyone remember the high bridge over the railway line in Ermin Street.....where the Hertz car rental place is.....next to the entry of the Howard Tenens industrial estate.
Can't remember the Stratton Station though.........any one know where the platform was in Stratton.

There's a good book, 'Fire & Steam' by Christian Wolmar, that I read last year about the birth and development of the railways in this country.  Lots of fascinating insights in to how the railways transformed the country from the 1830s onwards...and also goes in to some length about the mid-20th century line closures.

From what I remember, after the initial building boom in the 1830s & 1840s, there was another construction frenzy in later decades that added so many lines that were very little used.  Very often, tiny branch lines built by competing railway companies serving no more than a handful of market towns/villages and following similar lines to those of their competitors.  (A handful of these competing lines have survived - as the very messy and overly complex rail map in SE London/Kent proves.)

By the mid 20th century, most of these tiny branch lines had closed, and I think that's fair enough.  The problem with Beeching is he went too far; a more moderate cull would have been sensible, probably.  Unfortunately, he lived in a period where the motor car was in the ascendancy and car ownership was, in itself, associated with prosperity and economic success.  History has judged Beeching very harshly which, in some respects, is justified.  But he was a product of the time he was living in and back then people obviously regarded his plans with a lot less horror than they do now.

I see Steve Tucker almost every day. P&H installer/Builder.

he played for bassett too.
scored plenty of goals each season to be fair to him.

Thanks Spense/Arriba. I assume its the same guy. Would be 36/37 about now. I am sure he used to play for Purton youth. Haven't seen him in about 20 years mind! Remember he once took the longest time to take a free kick I have ever seen - he moved the ball forward a foot, the ref move it back a foot, he moved it forward a foot...you get the idea. In the end he and the ref had an exchange of views and i think he moved it forward again after the ref turned around :)

Anywho I guess it shows how much better you need to be to even get to a good standard of non-league footy. Or maybe my memory is playing tricks.

Must be a bit of a footballing fammily because his cousin is Matt Mills, the current Reading captain.

Think you'll find that a lot of railway historians credit Beeching with in fact saving a lot of the railway system.

Beeching essentially looked at revenues and chopped anything obviously loss making.

Unfortunately for Swindon this didn't take into account potential development, which could have made some of our lost bits at least viable now,

Steve Tucker was my apprentice at British Gas, and we both played in the same Hungerford team under Wilf Trantner. Sadly lost touch when that side split up

Leef the Stratton Halt was just down from the bridge that you describe, it consisted of a walkway down from by the bridge and a wooden platform on either side...it was called a Halt, because you could had to stick your arm out to get the train to stop.  Now your express wasn't going to stop, but there were local steam locos that would, these worked between Swindon and Reading serving branch lines like the Faringdon branch and stations like Uffington and Challow.

I nice book written in the 80's about this stretch of railway, combines two separate accounts by a fella called Adrian Vaughan....Signalman's Morning and Signalman's Twilight.  He was a young man serving as an apprentice signalman at the end of steam in the early 60's, and a decent writer.  The signal box at Challow was his domain.