OK. The development underway on land west of the sailing lake etc and north of Oldfield Road did provide £2m via a S.106 Agreement provided by the original developer. This was the best I could press for at the time and it meant that no social homes were provided and little or no contribution was made towards education etc. after the developer insisted on claiming that the viability of the site was working with thin margins and after a thorough open-book analysis was undertaken by consultants working with the planning case officer to establish what planning gain (blackmail by the council really) could be asked for by the council without risking a planning appeal that might cause all planning gain to be lost.
When WC highways officers checked on the cost of proceeding to build the bridge, it turned out that they were still about £500-750K short, so a relatively small amount still needs to be obtained. Some of that figure relates to buying land off Railtrack and/or Persimmon at both ends of the proposed bridge due to a legal cock-up which WC has powers to overcome though WC will still end up paying some money to sort this. Other costs are simply because civil engineering contract work has shot up in cost over the last decade.
If I had to make an educated guess about which bit of farm land is the most likely to be allocated for development nearby in the forthcoming new/revised issue of the Wiltshire Core Strategy (old name) or Local Plan (long-standing generic name for local planning policies), I would say it's most likely to be the piece of land to the right of Penleigh Road (the farm track) when walking from Mane Way towards Penleigh House. That large field on the right (or to the north) runs up to the railway line that runs towards Warminster. I would say that this is the nearby land (to the proposed bridge) that I most expect to be allocated in the revised local plan and which I then expect to be developed with a planning requirement to pay a sum towards completing the bridge. The site can get water-logged so the developer will argue about his costs of drainage etc but I am pretty sure there will be enough money to extract for the bridge even if it means there will be less than normal social homes etc built ...
I would expect it all to take about 6 - 10 years to get the bridge built, allowing 3 years just to sort the bridge after getting all the money lined up.
As for the new footpath / cycle lane from the Cinder track running beside Sidings Yard Lane to the Station car park, that should be built any time soon as per the conditions in the planning permission and per a promise by a director of the development firm to me. In the meantime, my appeal to the Planning Inspectorate claiming a new right of way along the closed section of the Cinder track is still rolling on and I am about 75% confident of winning that eventually. The reason I am confident is because during the toing and froing of legal argument before the papers all went off to an inspector, it was clear that the WC case officer was changing her argument every time she realised my case thoroughly proved her wrong and because I have piles of evidence in old maps located at the archives in Chippenham that show that the path existed and was used BEFORE the railways existed. Cllr Morland undertook all the research and wrote the lengthy and detailed legal arguments. All I really did was take the photos of the old maps over two long days ...
