Looking at the Train Sardine site now it looks no way near as professional as this one. The images are all saved in the wrong size and at the wrong rate of compression. The forum's not moderated and full of spam. They've also not built the website to work on different size monitors.
The general conscious of Train Sardine across different forums, seems to be that while overcrowding is an issue on East Midlands Trains services, especially between Warrington and Manchester, it is down to DfT» giving EMT» less carriages than Central Trains got for the same Liverpool to Norwich route, so a protest against EMT is pointless. It is also well known in the north that peak North TransPennine Express trains leave people behind at most stations that they serve between Liverpool and Leeds, again highlighting why should EMT be picked on by Train Sardine?
Thank you for those kind words about this forum, Northwesterntrains. The team of moderators does an excellent job, and I don't thank them often enough - so thank you for giving me the opportunity; it's one of those jobs which isn't noticed very often when it's being done well ... but the comparison with other sites that get spammed does help to show the sort of tasks involved.
I've just revisited TrainSardine, and they have only around 10% of the posts that we have here on "The Coffee Shop". Both sites were set up to service a need - a need to say "things aren't what they should be", and neither would have existed in the first place had it not been for very serious concerns amongst a number of people about what the Train Operating Companies were doing. I know that the Coffee Shop
would not have been created if First Great Western had provided
even a half sensible service on the TransWilts line ... and I can't help but wonder if I should (ironically) also be thanking
FGW▸ for just how busy we are. And with that busyness and number of posts, we have far more people willing to assist in providing the background services that keep images to scale, spam away, and so on - the sort of things you commented on.
Here's an admission. I would be happy - very happy indeed - to see improvements that reduces the need for the campaiging element of this forum. We had 3240 posts in the first two months of this year. I would much rather have had 1500 posts, and
appropriate travel opportunities available at my local station.
I'm noting also G.Uard's comments, posted while I was composing offline. Yes, we have grown to rather more than a pure protest site ... in any case, it's not much good just protesting and being negative - we need and have always encouraged constructive approaches. And I'm personally very happy to help passengers, operation staff, and managers on services that are running properly making the most of those proper services - but with a bit of jealousy, and a bit of
"please make it a level playing field and do the same for us".
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