Great Western Coffee Shop

What do Euston, Foyles, Dawlish and Crystal Palace have in common?

Tricky but I'll have a go......none of them will be served by HS2?

All the same distance from Melksham? ::)

Not what I had in mind.  I could add Paris – Saint Germain which is further


True enough but it's a bit more specific.  You could also have said that none of them has a Paternoster!

Pneumatic railways! (Though I'm not sure if Foyles' one was a true railway or just a cyclinder-in-tube one.)

Yep, Pneumatic transport.  I remember the Foyles system that took your cash and invoice to the central payment department and bright the receiptd invoice back.

And, for avoidance of doubt, that wasn't the Euston in West Suffolk.

Well, if you’d mentioned my local Co-op in 1960s Newcastle I’d have got it straightaway…  ;D

Similarly the former Jacksons shop in Reading, and many others in the past.

And not so past - our local Tesco was built with one in it 25 years ago. Not required for the original purpose of these things, of course, but I think to start with payments by cheque could be sent off via the tubes. It was in use until ten years ago, for decanting cash from the tills and some mysterious transaction when the operators changed over. Maybe it's still used, though these days I don't suppose they take in enough cash for risk reduction to be needed.

There was something like that in Sainsbury's Clifton Down too. I think they only have two staffed tills now, but that's another topic again.

A long time ago I used the "till pick up" when working at Tesco. Tills could be unloaded of cash and scannable coupons in tubes with a black lid at any time and often the till would prompt you to do this as it knew its contents. The "End of Day" cash, cheques and scannable coupons would go into a tube with a red lid and everything else into a green cloth bag (which one of my newer colleagues attempted to stuff down the hole once before I intervened)!
Certainly when I worked there you didn't have to do any of these when a colleague took over, but it probably was polite to if the till was fullish to save them a job.