The things I have to research sometimes to properly get to know Saltbury. We all know the town has a main line railway station. After all, Martine Fauld drives to the station most mornings, then takes the train into London to work at ‘Faulds’ Fashions’. But with the new book that is starting to take shape stretching so far back in time, I needed to know when the railway first arrived in the town and come to that where else it goes.

The second part is easy. Saltbury and Dowchester are both on the original Great Western Railway main line from London to Bristol and my two imaginary towns sit between the real world stations of Swindon and Chippenham. After that we know that the line opened as far as Chippenham on 31st May, 1841, so Saltbury probably opened the same day. The line was opened in its entirety a month later on 30th June. These days there are services each way between London, Bath and Bristol every half hour during the day, but only half of these stop at Saltbury, so we have an hourly service. There are also a few trains via Chippenham south to Salisbury, Southampton and Exeter. To get to Birmingham, Crewe or Scotland, you need to change at Bristol, but you can get a more direct train to Manchester via Reading. Isn’t this fun?

Oh, and Saltbury station follows the same Isambard Kingdom Brunel design as Chippenham,so we can say that there are four platforms, of which only two are currently in use. We also know from ‘Daughters’ that the main building contains a cafe as well as the ticket office (as does Chippenden). We can even have pictures thanks to Ben Brooksbank and Geof Shepard. on Wiki