From The Gazette and Herald

 
By chance I was in Devizes yesterday and had half an hour to spare so took a walk down Station Road to see what remains of the original railway.



The railway used to run under the town centre and emerge shortly before the station.

I didn't have time to explore the other end of the tunnel which hasn't been "commercialised".

Much of the station site is now a car park - and for the first time I saw a car charging point actually being used..

 
Elon Musk has penetrated deepest Wiltshire I see.

 
Left to your own Devizes, as they say... 

Paul

 
Very interesting to hear the case / background (including the third party and funding support routes) for this station at the Trowbridge DfT consultation.

The recast of the Berks and Hants regional services (as opposed to the hell-for-leather London to Plymouth+ expresses) provides a solid base of trains that could stop on a sensible pattern (frequency still for discussion for future years).  Traffic at Devizes would supplement traffic from other stations all along from Newbury to Taunton making for a better case for more rather than less trains all along, with excellent connections made off the train coming in regularly from the Reading direction via both Trowbridge and Warminster, as well as helping to secure a clock face service with connections for arrivals at Westbury via Trowbridge and Warminster headed for the West Country.

 
The most rural places I've seen Teslas are a village, or hamlet, called Hoarwithy on the banks of the Wye between Hereford and Ross, where it was parked in an open-sided "garage" scooped out of the earth bank of the roadside, and Whittington near Cheltenham, where I had the unusual experience of being overtaken by an almost silent vehicle as I laboured up a steep country lane. And non-Tesla plug-ins all over the Cotswolds.

But to address the subject of the thread, it all sounds good and I'm sure Devizes is too big not to have a station; but what's the likelihood?

 

What do we want?
A station, soon!
What are the chances?
Negligible!

 
From This is Wiltshire

 
I see Mr Kruger is still trying:

 
Two years ago but still a great gag.

 
Mr Kruger was interviewed on BBC Wiltshire this afternoon on the drive time show.  He was giving the impression that the proposal was to open the closed line to Devizes.  He was very vague on details but stated thet there would be a bus service and cycle route between the station and the town centre.  He also stated that the station would bring people from elsewhere.  Full interview available on iplayer
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0824sdx about 46 minutes in

 
I think it's clear he's talking about Patney and Chirton, or 'Devizes Parkway' as he has it. What I find puzzling is his reference to connecting Devizes with Bristol - it's hard to see a quick route from there.

 

It's Lydeway - where the A342 crossed the railway at what used to be "The Clock" Pub now, I believe, a caravan park.   All the stuff about relaying lines - no.  Re-opening a Beeching closure - no; new location.  Lydeway is closer to Devizes than Patney and Chirton, which is in the middle of a remove area with a thin web of narrow lanes unfit for station traffic.  Remember that Mr Kruger is a spin doctor.

To Bristol - aspiration is for decent connections from Bedwyn and Pewsey (and Devizes Parkway) at Westbury onto trains to Trowbridge (the county town), Bath and Bristol for commuters.  Really not good at the moment.  And also for the semifast IET to be up to hourly.   

All very sensible; everyone looking at the same case towards the same goals. 

 
From the Wiltshire Times


The local MP is Danny Kruger - pictured in a socially distanced group at a crossing in the article

 
Could I ask where is the planned new station "facilities" are planned car park taxi rank bus/s turn round?

Will it be a single sided access station or access from both sides

 

From devizes.org.uk

I'm seeing buses, car parking, and an airstrip.  Nothing marked for taxis, kiss and ride, or cycles (but that could be due to scale).  All facilities on northern side with footbridge (ramps) to access a platform on south side.

Plans can obviously be revised as subsequent iterations; MP is talking of community engagement and this being the beginning of the process.

 
The airstrip is an existing facility. Not sure how much it is used

 
Seems like an awfully long access road to accommodate an easily relocated grass airstrip, or are there noise/braking/sighting issues that place the station site so far from the main road? An interesting rail-air interchange  .

Would TonyK like to comment on a 400 capacity carpark in the airstrip undershoot/overshoot?

 

A quick look at the OS (and some knowledge of the area) shows that there is a quite steep but short cutting in the vicinity of the bridge. Siting the station as proposed would save digging lumps out of that to provide platform and road access/parking space.

 

Agreed - it does make sense.  The original Berks and Hants line from Newbury via Hungerford and Pewsey ran to Devizes (opened 1862) then in 1900 a cutoff was opened from a new station at Patney and Chirton (where the minor road crosses the railway on the right of this map), falling and through a cutting before bearing off to the left.



There would indeed be a fair chunk of digging out to get platforms down onto the line near the A342, and as the cutting was not built until after the end of broad gauge, the cutting is only standard gauge width - no extra slack .   Even the selected site is only halfway from the A342 to Patney and Chirton

 

"This" being 7th July 2020 for anyone who comes back to my quote out of context at a later date.  Link to

https://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/18471455.devizes-wins-government-cash-train-station-project/

 
Hopefully it will be opened by the Wurzels in due course, with a cafe selling hot meat pies and cider.

 
The Wurzels belong to Somerset ! Why not try raking in a few Moonrakers instead?

 
I doubt there's room for more than one Space Shuttle.🤔

 
ITV West covering the story on tuesday evening,available on channel 33 at 19:00pm as well.

 
But they did immortalise Devizes, I think more because of the opportunity for rhyming with it than it's rather loose association with the West Country proper.

 

That doesn't surprise me - but then again, I never get surprises! 

 

I was thinking more of a limerick with prizes and sizes.

---

The piece on ITV was a good one - and excellent to see that they found only people who thought it was a good idea on Devizes Market (mainly because it IS a good idea).    Nothing like local unanimous support to make the civil servants and ministers feel comfortable helping it move forward.   Good for Devizes (and so unlike elements of the local sentiment at some others places including one I was discussing with a member on the phone this afternoon).

Interesting to hear "we don't have public transport" from one exponent of the scheme and "buses to Trowbridge or Swindon are a real downer" from another.   The second was right and the station WOULD be used (and probably abstract very little).  Perhaps the first is too upper class to lower herself to a bus.  A third person commented that using public transport for her means driving to Great Bedwyn.

 
Reading the Wiltshire Times article I had to smile at the statement "within five years", if the progress on Portway Parkway is anything to go by you might want to add a zero to the five but then being Wiltshire it could happen because it's not Bristol !!!!

 

It's within the election cycle, with a conservative council, a conservative MP who's part of the inner circle, at a time of a conservative government, on a line with a service that could stop there, a strong local sentiment, ticks climate change and integrated transport boxes, and has what looks to me like a good business case.  The ducks might be in a line. Mind - it would be the first (re)opening in Wiltshire since 1985.

 

All sounds very hopeful. Remind us, grahame: Which Wiltshire station re-opened in 1985?

 

Me?  ...
Errr ...
Lets
Kid
Someone I know.
How does
Anyone
Manage to remember from so long ago?

 
Presumably the train which narrowly avoided hitting a person in Devizes earlier today was being transported by road at the time? Note the phrase IN Devizes.

http://www.terrascope.co.uk/images/Devizes_train.png

 
Well it is in the Devizes parliamentary constituency. 

 
Yup, on the rails!
https://www.wiltshire999s.co.uk/man-taken-to-hospital-after-narrowly-avoiding-being-hit-by-train-in-devizes/
The man was reportedly walking in the middle of the track, only jumping out of the way of the oncoming Great Western Railway (GWR) train with just seconds to spare. Continues..

 


A couple of miles from Devizes ... about a mile from Urchfont.  Lydeway is half a mile away.

///responded.kickers.professed is more accurate I suspect - the location from which the picture illustrating the article was taken, and where the A342 crossed the railway line.

 

A frequent type of error on local news websites staffed by deskbound junior reporters with no knowledge of their patch. I recall an incident at Hampstead Norreys being attributed to Newbury, eight miles away.

Another annoyance is league tables of "Reading's most expensive streets", where the top entries are in Wargrave, Shiplake and other "desirable" villages.

 
From the Gazette and Herald


There are links in the article ... however, following one of them I got the following sign-up request and I'll leave to individual members to follow the links and decide if they're happy with this, which appears to be the newspaper building up a mailing list??

 
The railway will no longer be leaving the town to its own Devizes.

(.....I'll get my coat)

 
From the Gazette and Herald

 
The last weeks ... new year, no-one going out, best shows on TV worn out over Christmas ... there has been a lot of online activity, with people reading social media and papers online and based on what they have (skim)read been making comments and asking questions.   Although there are background information sites for some of these projects, they tend not to be "FAQ formatted" for the new reader, even if the project newcomer goes to the site.   So there are some daft ideas that come up, but spiced in there are some which merit addressing - either because they could actually make sense or because they've not been addressed elsewhere

"A station three miles out of the town wouldn't be near enough for anyone to use of it and it would be a waste of money - why not run the train into the town where it used to go then loop back to the main line?".

Hmmm ...



As a corollary, why (when the line through Urchfont and Lavington was built) didn't it branch off to the west of Devizes anyway along the proposed new route?   Answer - heavy gradients just outside Devizes not suitable for long distance expresses.  Twisty bits in Devizes an issue too.    In modern day, Gradients not an issue (but 120 years ago they would have been) and if the train is string and restarting, the sharp corner not a problem.

Big problem ... cost.  Around 10 times the cost of even a quite substantial station as proposed ... also the trackbed though Devizes has been reclaimed from the railway in part. 

 
Also not sexy enough politically, in an area where a hatstand with a blue rosette on could get elected - Certainly not an East-West Rail or Ashington in terms of Central Wales Line "Look at the marginals on that" territory.

 
ITV west did a feature on Devizies Parkway on friday evening local news,maybe at the expense of Corsham re-opening.

 

Different line, different catchment areas, different constituency, different services, different case ... there probably will be trade-offs in terms of unitary council officer's time and perhaps some budget elements, but the headline should not be a tradeoff between the two.

Last new station in Wiltshire 84 years ago, only one station re-opened since then and that was 36 years ago.  Either would be a miracle in this county ... though there are effective players involved and a miracle could happen.

 

It could have been worse – they could have suggested taking the line back downhill again by repurposing Caen Hill flight 

These sorts of comments are frequent amongst the ill-informed or non-informed on general comment boards, and indeed in person too.

I used to have an arguing partner in South Africa who actually came from Bognor and went over there for the UK winter like me. One day we were having a discussion about some SPAD or other that had happened in the UK and got into the national press. He came up with what he thought was the perfect solution – “Simple innit? What they need is something that puts the brakes on if a driver passes a red signal.”

This was the same geezer who one day was complaining about the squeal of the wheels of trains entering Fish Hoek from Simonstown on a tight radius cure. Said he “they should put a bit of oil on that...”

 

https://www.gazetteandherald.co.uk/news/19050560.2-000-respond-devizes-station-survey/

 

https://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/19090536.connecting-rail-services-bedwyn-devizes---views-sought/

 
From the Gazette and Herald

 
An update on the new Devizies station on ITV West local news at 18:08pm on Wednesday 20 July

Available on ITV plus one

 
A new station at (or nearish to) Devizes has go itself caught up in the need for a fourth platform face at Westbury which (surprise) cannot be justified based only on the extra station / traffic at Devizes.   It strikes me as the same issue that the study of specifying from Newbury to Westbury came up with when the costs were loaded onto the two electric trains a day that would terminate at Westbury, and in contravention of the need to look at the whole picture including the net zero agenda.

More in another thread (I will copy elements here) and on Facebook (here)

 
Devizes Parkway study released by Network Rail
This report simply concludes that it is not economic as a standalone station due the impact on the wider railway. The implication is that it has to be oart of a larger scheme to introduce a stopping service along the B&H, and beyond, which will need reinstatement of the platform at Westbury

https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/our-routes/western/devizes-gateway-feasibility-study/

See also Paul Clifton on Twitter
https://twitter.com/paulcliftonbbc/status/1641718630227296257?s=61&t=VlafMC5gF9tidw36b1Y8JQ

 
A very comprehensive and well written report.  Hopefully it will pave the way (eventually) for a platform 0 at Westbury and reinstatement of the Bedwyn<>Paddington service to extend to it and serve a new station at Devizes as well as better serve Pewsey.

It’ll be quite a wait though I fear.

 
Wednesday, 8th October 2025

Black Swan, Devizes (in the Market Place), from 18:30 for 19:00 to hear from Brian Mathew MP with "an update on the Devizes rail station situation". I'll probaly go up on the bus from Melksham at 17:34 or 18:08 ... return at 20:00 (if it's a short meeting) or 22:10 if it's long.

 
From the Wiltshire Times



and


Don't quite believe everything you read in key messages even when the paper prints them.  "People don’t want to drive to Devizes but there is no other way to get people to the town" is somewhat false; Devizes is at the hub of an execellent (for not-a-city) network of but routes, with about hourly departures to Bath, Chippenham, Swindon, The Lavingtons, Salisbury and Trowbridge, and less frequent services to Westbury, Pewsey, Lackham, Marlborough, Bradford-on-Avon and Upavon.   There are two town bus vehicles too, and demand responsive services available to the really awkwardly unclustered villages to the east.   That is not to say that a railway link is NOT needed - it is, but initially traffic flows would look much more like Pewsey, where 56% of 209,000 journeys last year were to or from London rather than like Melksham, where just 10% of 60,000 journeys were to or from London. (Food for thought there - what a direct service does!)

 
I have to wonder if the new Devizes station will (eventually) go the same way as the A350 Melksham (and Westbury !) bypass.

 

Past form has many ideas and plans than have failed along the way, but a number of them have "come around" again and gone on to be implemented, often in a modified way. How else would we keep bread on the table for all those consultants?

I am reminded of selling a house (we've done that a few times). A number of initial enquiries, some looking very good, others which you can see won't go through to fruition as soon as you meet the people.  But then one comes along and all the pieces are joined up and the sale completes for the benefit of all parties.  And that one may well be late in the game and not entirely expected.

 

Isn't this basically the British planning system in a nutshell? How much time and money is wasted trying to build the case that a project is perfect?

The reality is that the site isn't difficult, the line has the capacity and it builds the business case for expanding Westbury's capacity.

Yes, a Devizes Parkway station is initially going to largely benefit commuters to Newbury, Reading & London, yes, it will likely abstract some traffic from Chippenham and Pewsey, but reducing pressure on rural roads and car parks in no bad thing. As a new built station station, it should be fully accessible, have a decent taxi/bus transfer, it will only be a short journey into Devizes and there's space for a cycleway along at least part of the route.   

Even better, as the previous posters have mentioned, it isn't likely to abstract from Devizes' bus traffic, and of course once it's built and usage patterns emerge, there's plenty of scope for new services e.g. a Newbury to Chippenham or London to Bristol via Westbury.

If it was built today, in 20 years, would anyone think it was £20m badly spent? Absolutely not. 


 

 

The British planning system requires so much on surrounding land and effects.

Yes building station isn't difficult, but the planning will spill over.

Highways will want a big super safe junction into station, better than most existing turnings on A road because it is new.
The bus company won't support it unless station, and intermediate bus stops are at accessible compliant standards (so any on verges along A road will need redoing)
The cycle lobby won't approve of a relatively narrow unlit fast road being make connection to station so will ask for wide cycle path
Similarly no footpath along road to town from station will be objected to
Then of course if a car park is built, needs to meet standards of today with proportion of disabled spaces, EV charging spaces etc.
Then there will be loss of some countryside, so alternative or replacement would need evaluating.
Talking of evaluating, flood report, EIA (environment impact assessment), Wildlife comments, and if any ground has endangered or protected species, that is going to need a study
etc, etc, ........

Building the station is easy bit, paperwork, and planning is the faff

 
I'm afraid that John D has rather hit the proverbial nail on the head. Having said that, if Wiltshire Council could include promoting a station for Devizes as part of its transport infrastructure policy in the up-coming new Local Plan, and ensured that funding it and associated access infrastructure was included in the next revision of the reg 123 list of projects to be funded by Community Infrastructure Levy then it might help move things on.

BTW - Is it time to change the title of this thread? It's now over 60 years since the Devizes branch closed. Perhaps "Devizes wait since 1966..." ?

 
At the dawn of the railway age, when journeys could be reduced from days to hours, it would not have been difficult to justify a scheme, even using today's framework.
However, now, time savings (the main component of benefit/cost calculations) are usually marginal.
For a scheme like Devizes Gateway, where access by car is likely to be a dominant feature, the other possible benefits such as accessibility, boosts to the local economy and local traffic reduction are also going to be hard to produce. Planning doesn't require a perfect scheme, but it jolly well ensure that the scheme has more benefit than cost - and preferably more value than other uses to which the capital could be put.
Maybe the waste comes from asking the same question many times and hoping for a different answer? 


The scheme's promoters have insisted it will have benefits to the local economy by bringing people to Devizes. I hope it would. But I also have to ask how a connecting bus service would be funded for the long-term, and how attractive a taxi service would be. I am not giving answers here, but one could look at, say, Aschurch for Tewkesbury, Bodmin and East Midlands Parkway to provide a guide to how successful the scheme would be in meeting the promoters' aims.


Low abstraction from Devizes' bus traffic is partly because much of the Devizes travel demand is to Swindon, Bath, Bristol. Starting off in the wrong direction for several miles might make rail a bit uncompetitive.


Predicting the future is liable to failure. Some people would be delighted to have their train to London, whether or not the other objectives have materialised. Some would benefit from house price changes; some would lose out. Maybe there would be a Lydeway Newtown, if recent ideas in planning guidance prevail.

Please don't misunderstand me. I would like to see new stations and more comprehensive public transport. I could find plenty to criticise about the scheme development and appraisal process. But it's not the fault of this process that construction costs have risen faster than CPI inflation, that the railway's running costs seem to have ballooned, or that the railway investment pipeline (RNEP) was pretty much dry of funds from its inception.


 

 

Suggestion noted: now done.

CfN. 

 
Some excellent points from Noggin, Trowres and others.

I came on here ... intending to quote points from both of you, and wider, and 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

I got rather carried away - make of this what you will.  Spoiler - if done right it should work (and lots of very terse comments below hide a whole lot of experience and pointers) but if not done right / the bits don't join up ...

Experience widened to make comment / perhaps draw more recent lessons from Melksham ...

---

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.

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.

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 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 (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.

 

 
Thank you for that long, but engaging, post, Grahame. It reminds me that I would have been regarded as eccentric for much of my time in private industry as I visited customers by public transport; anywhere between Perth and Portland.  I gained a lot of pleasure from the journeys at that time, but there was also some logic in that I was working long days and not having to drive when tired was a safer option.

Your post also illustrates that there is a lot more to modal choice than the transport modellers' favourite variables: cost and journey time. The transport planning profession is more alert to these things nowadays,  but it is hard to model qualitative dimensions (things you can't put a number on) and the information to calibrate a model may simply not exist.

Beware!
Things that are easy to measure but relatively unimportant tend to assert excessive influence;
Things that are important but hard to define and measure are overlooked in policy and objective setting.

So often, we approach planning with a preconceived "solution" and then find enough reasons to justify it. That's not how it's supposed to work but the relevant guidance is usually ignored.

Strange, isn't it, that, outside London, the UK is notably poor at making its public transport work as a system (not just bus and rail: even the railway itself struggles to think of itself as a system). It is conceivable that Devizes Gateway could be made to work for the benefit of the town economy. To do so, I think, probably needs revolutionary change over the whole country.