Moderator's Meeting on Saturday

To those of you who sent me emails with your thoughts and inputs for the moderator's meeting that we held today (only the second time we have foamlly met up in 26 months!), many thanks. We were delighted that the messages were very supportive - and thank you for that and your kind comments. The general 'tone' of the meeting was that the Coffee Shop is running along very smoothly, and if "it ain't bust, don't fix it" ... so any changes will be small and incremental ones, rather than dramatic switches. However, some points are worthy of comment.

First Great Western are doing better - VERY MUCH better - in service reliability, and have fixed most (but not yet all) of the more crass timetabling changes that happened or should have happened in December 2006. Changes such as stops at Severn Tunnel Junction, 3 car trains on Cariff -> Portsmouth are very helpful indeed. In January 2007, we were drawing graphs of cancellations at my local station and some 30% of services were being canned - but cancellations there are now very rare. And so much of the protest element of the site has contracted. You'll notice the same thing at "More Train Less Strain" - also FGW^▸ - and at you'll see that TrainSardine is quieter too. However, the protest element remains - it came across very clearly to me when I heard Mark Hopwood talk at TWSW^» earlier this month that his main concern is in meeting the specification set by the DfT^» , and not in meeting the needs of his passengers. Of course, those goals often co-incide, but not always; with FGW declaring staff redundant at present, we do need to ask that it be done by running more efficiently, and not be cutting services to customers. And the protest element remains on lines like the TransWilts, where the five largest population centres are now linked by a travesty of a parliamentary service. When First took over on 1.4.2006, 6 trains called at Melksham between 08:00 and 19:00 - but that has been cut to ZERO trains calling in that time. For the TransWilts, at least, calling for an appropriate service remains a key objective.

Threads are getting longer and wandering more. Again, that's natural as a board grows; it's easy to find what you'll looking for in a resource of 500 messages, when another dozen are added each day by a pool of 40 members. But it's much harder when you eighty times that number of messages, eight times that number of daily posts, and 15 times that number of members. The moderators do try to steer things along, but if they do too much along those lines they're accused of being heavy handed. So I think this lengthening, wandering has to be accepted o some extent. We have, over the two years, added a number of extra boards such as "The Lighter Side" to that quizzes, games that some people love and others despise can be easily filtered by those who don't want to get involved.

Last year, we had regular posts concerning news from the area served by FGW and effecting it, but not "rail news". Anything from economic news to ferry services to local politics. Such threads were notable by the fact that they were rarely followed up, and they generated very little positive feedback but some elements asked "why are they here". Personally, I found them useful and was thankful for the broader picture, but I concluded that I was in a minority. It turs out from some of the feedback over the past few days that a significant silent group also mourns the passing of these threads - however, they won't be returning in the same form. Lee - who did such sterling work researching many of them - feels that it's far better use of his time and resources to concentrate on other issues (and that the other issues aren't so thankless either!), and I'm delighted that he's providing sterling assistance on the "Save the Train" campaign.

Posts of service disruptions have fallen off too; partly because there are less disruptions now, and partly because of the graphic at the top of the page which gives a very quick snapshot of the status across the South West without the need to post quite so high a proportion of the individual matters. The diagrams are great for the immediate, and leave the forum much clearer for the strategic and tactical.

We do have some, incremental, ideas that you may see coming to fruition in coming days and weeks. I am not going to pre-announce very much as some of them need further thought and experimentation and I would not want to disappoint by building hopes up. What you may see, though, quite soon is the appointment of a couple more moderators. Roles on the forum, and roles in life away from the forum too, change; people who were active become less so, and other segments and newer member groups need to be represented. I am utterly delighted that those moderators you don't see around very often any longer remain with us in a 'respected elder statesman' role - sharing their thoughts on how we run the board, and on hand to help should we need to call them up in an emergency.

User feedback is vital - so please excuse the length of this post which answers most of the matters raised by your emails. It's the members that make the board, and I hope that what I've written helps give the background behind some of the things you've raised, and the reason we do things in the way we do. That vital feedback also gives us a 'steer' in terms of how we develop and is being taken very much on board.