Great Western Coffee Shop

Edit - holding page moved - http://www.greatbritishrailways.info/ - at 09:00 on 28.1.2024

Welcome to a holding thread for Great British Railways information  at http://www.greatbritishrailways.info/ - as, when and if that project starts to fledge, this URL will leave the nest and be redirected, and with a very clear link to the main site of Great British Railways.

In the meantime, welcome to the Great Western Railway Coffee Shop. Our search engine (don't worry - it's clean, not diesel or coal so environmentally safe) will find you Great British Railways in discussions and mirrored documents across our Passenger Forum - (link here) (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/research.html?search=Great+British+Railways&sortby=update&kount=200&nm=1&impo=2&limits=all&dates=2019). As fresh posts and documents get added, they will automatically come up at the top of the listing there.

Great British Railways Transition Team, official site - https://gbrtt.co.uk

For individual Train operating companies ...
Rail forum, Great Western Railway - http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/
Rail forum, Transport for Wales - http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/b23
Rail forum, Cross Country - http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/b43
Rail forum, South Western Railway - http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/b42
Rail forum, Transport for London - http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/b46
Rail forum across Great Britain - http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/b51
Rail forum, International topics  - http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/b52

You need to be careful - the public face of GBR may indeed become the 'dot com' version of your URL, and this would then possibly be seen as too close to the official site and may need a rather large & cumbersome redrection click thru on your front page.

I understand this, Chris, but thanks for the alert; we went through a discussion with First at the time we registered firstgreatwestern.info, though I appreciate that time has moved on and also that they are a different organisation with perhaps different views.    As it stands, it links to information about Great British Railways (I am still working on the link) and does include a link to the transformation team, to be updated with other links as appropriate.

Sorry, I was referring to the likelihood of GBR using www.greatbritishrailways.com & not liking your equivalent .info site.

Indeed.   Though certainly NOT "equivalent".

If GBR were concerned with url's close to their name they would have grabbed the most likely ones by now, GBR do have a media team

Thank you, yes, and I 99% agree - though on past experience some big organisations have not done a very clean job of mopping up domains.    In this case, the co.uk and .com domains are both registered and parked.

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I have moved the "landing page" away from this thread - ongoing discussion welcome here - so that any newcomers looking for GBR information are directed to a clean and prepared carriage and not one in which we regulars are having a party discussing our own operations.   We have the luxury of being able to have both carriages and that other one - at http://www.greatbritishrailways.info/ includes a link to this thread for anyone who wants to read or join in.

Does anyone else remember when bbc.com got you the Baltimore Bathroom Company? I think they eventually decided it was more trouble then it was worth!

There have been a number of such stories (Harrods was another) and indeed readers might be surprised just how often opportunities to register confusing or close domains exist.  It is very rarely (if ever?) worth registering something to deliberately confuse - http://greatbritishrailway.com (singular) is registered but NOT by me. My feeling is / has been that .info is a valid top level registration for "information about" provided it includes a clear statement that is is just that (information about) and also includes a clear statement of independence and a link to the official site(s) of the entity / place / thing it is about. 

Edited to split over-long sentence!