About the Coffee Shop Forum
• We opened in 2007 and our forum is still here. Latest topics:at 09:39: Taking Train Operation into public ownership - Govt planning from 4.12.2024
at 08:09: Night Riviera Sleeper train - between Paddington and Penzance
at 06:52: Station lighting hours
... more
Originally the "First Great Western Coffee Shop Forum" and now the "Great Western Railway Coffee Shop Forum", we have 358596 posts of which 22 are new posts yesterday and today. The Coffee Shop is run by a team of public transport passengers, for passengers. We are free and independent. Views expressed are the views of individual contributors. Webmaster email - admin@railcustomer.info in the event of any issues.
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Status:
qRe: Taking Train Operation into public ownership - Govt planning from 4.12.2024
: JRe: Night Riviera Sleeper train - between Paddington and Penzance
XRe: Station lighting hours
: PRe: 2025 - Service update and amendment log, Swindon <-> Westbury
RSalisbury area station disruption
: : : : PRe: How to provide capacity and increase service to hourly each way via Melksham
\Re: Where was Finn today, 15th May 2025?
: : . \Re: Where am I today, 17.5.2025
: qRe: HS2 - Government proposals, alternative routes and general discussion
: : : : LRe: North Cotswold line delays and cancellations - 2025
: URe: Cardiff Bay Station branch
: XRe: Shortage of train crews on Great Western Railway - ongoing discussion
: : {8;4;} [guest] (2 hours)• If you scroll down, you'll find a feed about our forum news.
• And you can jump using the icons at the top of the page
News Feed
Updated 30th March 2025
On 25th March at around 06:15, our cloud server hosted in a London data centre suffered a power outage. Usually these things come straight back up but in a cruel twist of fate, updates were being written at the instant the power failed to the extent that severe damage was done to the disc image. Service restored, read only, that afternoon with full return the following day (26th March). No posts were lost - a good test of our backups, and good practise to check that these systems were in place.
Following our late 2024 restructure, we are now running using https (secure) protocols. We are moving towards responsive formats to make the site more friendly when used on smaller screens such as phones, but still giving the same access to over 25,000 user-contributed threads of data.
This graphic shows how we have moved on from a single server to a reception and worker set up, with a surge of access once we changed over - mostly explained by search engines re-indexing us.As we upgrade and modernise the protocols, we are making a number of other changes over coming months. We hope you enjoy new Coffee Shop experiences and continue to be comfortable in the well established ones. The Coffee Shop continues to be free to use and free of adverts. We are here for the public transport passenger, and independent.
Please get in touch with the team in the event of any issues - our users are our lifeblood.
Ready for 2025
We have understaken a major restructure of the Coffee Shop Forum in the final days of 2024. The Forum is up and running again for 2025 with the same familiar look and feel, and databases too. You will find that there are a few internal changes and things still to be checked out / debugged in the new structure - please report these is not already noted on the forum. The biggest change you'll see is that we're now using secure (https) protocols.
