Rail travel boost for Westbury

Rail travel in Westbury could get a boost from a new train operator proposing a significant addition to the rail timetable from summer 2020.

The proposal from GO-OP – an independent co-operative society – will bring an additional six services a day to the town

The service will connect Westbury to the West Midlands, with the service going as far as Nuneaton, via Oxford, Leamington Spa and Coventry. The service will also offer additional connections to Somerset, stopping in places like Frome, Castle Cary, Taunton and Yeovil.  

Alex Lawrie, the operations director and a founder member of GO-OP, told White Horse News, “This will make Westbury a real hub for interchange and puts the station in a very interesting position – it may mean more investment in the station as it is currently only a three-platform station. 

GO-OP has been working on its plans for several years and had announced in 2016 that it hoped to gradually introduce the new services from 2017. Alex said, “We’ve had a couple of false starts and have realised that perhaps we weren’t as well prepared as we thought. The technical difficulties are hard to overstate. The UK railways are – for good reason – carefully regulated and we must prove in great detail that our ideas stack up. But we learn and we move on. This is a new submission and we think that this is the one!

“We are holding a public meeting in Frome on Thursday 4th April. We’d encourage anyone who’d like to find out more to come to these events, or visit www.go-op.coop for more information. This is just the start – we need to start planning bus services to bring people to the stations, and consider how we can further develop and enhance the service. Anyone in the area we serve can be part of the conversation.”

The meeting will take place  at 5pm – 6.30pm. The venue is to be confirmed, please check the GO-OP website for updates: www.go-op.coop