About the Coffee Shop Forum
• We opened in 2007 and our forum is still here. Latest topics:at 12:32: 'Huge amount' of silt keeps Gloucester Lock shut after summer dry weather - 2025 New topic!
at 12:17: Unease after village crowned world's most beautiful - Bibury, Gloucestershire New topic!
at 12:04: Bristol First Bus Drivers Strike Planned 16 to 19 September New topic!
... more
Originally the "First Great Western Coffee Shop Forum" and now the "Great Western Railway Coffee Shop Forum", we have 362482 posts of which 46 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.
Read about how the forum works. If and you would like to join in, please register here
Status:
q'Huge amount' of silt keeps Gloucester Lock shut after summer dry weather - 2025
XUnease after village crowned world's most beautiful - Bibury, Gloucestershire
SBristol First Bus Drivers Strike Planned 16 to 19 September
SRe: Bristol - Prince Street bridge to be closed to all cars
CRe: Hitchhiking
ARe: Good service? Say it officially and disjoint managers may believe it?
. XRe: "More trains than usual needing repair"
: : : : : : : IRe: GWR Pembroke Dock Services Summer 2025
: : CRe: Very unusual aircraft
[Re: ALERT - 1.9.2025 - Unplanned temporary closure of service
. : qRe: OpenRailwayMap
: BRe: A new class of refund needed ......
: XRe: Weather updates, from across our area - merged posts
mSteam engine Newstead on the Blaenavon Heritage Railway
: . {7;3;} [guest] (16 mins)• If you scroll down, you'll find a feed about our forum news.
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News Feed
Updated 1st September 2025
All running sweetly at present
On 29th August 2025 at around 20:30 our backroom server ceased service page but was still visible to our webmaster in Read-Only mode, and an urgent additional backup was taken. It turned out that change at our service provider had been the route cause. The Coffee Shop was restored on a temporary basis at 06:00 on 30th August and steps have been taken to ensure that the problem does recur.
On 25th March 2025 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 undertaken 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.
