Great Western Coffee Shop

In response to grahame's survey, asking for your views, there has been significant support for the idea that members of this forum respond formally to the consultation by Network Rail on their Great Western Route Utilisation Strategy - see http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=5271.0 

The consultation makes the point that there are no specific questions or subjects on which they are seeking views, but rather, they will welcome all comments on the strategy.

Having (inadvertently ::) ) volunteered to take this forward, and having discussed it with grahame, what I would like to do is compile a document, setting out the views of all members of this forum, to be submitted as part of this consultation.  We don't want to restrict our response to comments from the admin / moderator team, nor to 'frequent posters': we believe it will be most helpful if we can combine all the views of our members here - whether you are passengers, staff or 'others' - to produce such a response.

However, I don't want to take over the whole process, so what I would like to do is invite some well-known members here to act as local contacts, who will hopefully be able to 'collate' responses from members in their respective areas and help with integrating them into our formal response to Network Rail.

I'll be contacting some of you individually by 'personal message', later this evening, but please don't be offended if you're not contacted initially (or even if you are!).  What we would like to do is set up a network of active members, throughout the FGW area, who will hopefully be able to help in this way. This is not a 'selection process' - it's really just a bit of a 'stab in the dark', with the intention of getting a team of us together who will hopefully have the time and interest to take this forward.

What we envisage is that a few new topics will be posted on some of our local boards - marked as 'sticky', so they stay at the top.  Members will then be very welcome to post their comments there, so they can be collated by the local 'volunteer'!

I hope this is clear, but if anyone has any queries, please do contact me, by personal message!

Thanks, Chris  ;) :D ;D