It was a great pleasure to attend the West Wiltshire Rail Users’ group’s 25th anniversary lunch at the excellent Manor Hotel Trowle on Saturday.

WWRUG is influential and authoritative, a repository of expertise and understanding about rail transport that has been extremely useful when it comes to arguing for better rail transport in our area.

This is currently very important because we need to avoid becoming poor country cousins to grand schemes like HS2.

Fortunately this is being recognised with billions being announced by the department for transport for improved connectivity, electrification and stations.

Big publically funded infrastructure projects like this are essential to underpin our now buoyant economy.

In my remarks on Saturday I said that we have a tendency in the UK to imagine a golden age of rail transport. But chairman Roger Newman read an extract from the 1989 timetable which was interesting since the frequency of services from West Wilts towns has improved beyond all recognition during the lifetime of the group.

I have the distinction of having once been a seasonal employee of a subsidiary of British Rail, Sealink, shortly before WWRUG was founded. I clearly remember my first day because the National Union of Seamen decided to call a strike.

What with the notoriously curly BR sandwich, strikes and indifferent and infrequent services, I’m not sure we would want to go back to those days. People calling for re-nationalisation need to say how we could have increased rail carriage so dramatically and reduced costs to the taxpayer without the return to the market, for all its ups and downs, that has characterised the rail industry in this country over the past three decades.

I had the great pleasure of debating the Great War with students at Exeter University on Friday in my capacity as the PM’s Rep for the centenary commemoration.

I’m delighted that new polling data suggests our understanding of the conflict has greatly increased since the start of the centenary.