When can I contact customer services / book a ticket from FGW?

[whole diary]

[grahame]

It's 04:50.  FGW^▸ (First Great Western) ticket website currently states.

Site is temporarily unavailable

We are currently working on our site. Please try again in the morning.
In the meantime, to buy tickets or plan a journey please call 08457 000125 where a member of our team will be pleased to assist you.

but main pages still states:

Customer Services       08457 000 125 (open 07:00 to 22:00 daily)

Improved hours? Extended hours while the web site is down?

I was looking to research loads of fares ... so not calling to try

[grahame]

Having posted that up ... I wondered what proportion of rail-ish information gathering / remote booking, etc, happens at what time of day.  I went through our database of posts, and looked at the original posting times on the forum hour by hour from when we started.  Results:


0 3841 (3.91%)
1 1823 (1.86%)
2 861 (0.88%)
3 577 (0.59%)
4 405 (0.41%)
5 515 (0.52%)
6 1037 (1.06%)
7 1938 (1.97%)
8 2411 (2.45%)
9 3587 (3.65%)
10 4199 (4.27%)
11 4447 (4.53%)
12 4117 (4.19%)
13 3881 (3.95%)
14 4069 (4.14%)
15 4798 (4.88%)
16 5587 (5.69%)
17 6345 (6.46%)
18 6808 (6.93%)
19 6761 (6.88%)
20 7453 (7.59%)
21 8331 (8.48%)
22 8034 (8.18%)
23 6398 (6.51%)

While I was at it, I did "days of the week" too:

12575 (12.80%) Sunday
14970 (15.24%) Monday
14641 (14.91%) Tuesday
14970 (15.24%) Wednesday
15134 (15.41%) Thursday
14568 (14.83%) Friday
11365 (11.57%) Saturday

I'm very conscious that the daily / weekly pattern of use of a service is likely to be effected by the time that the service is available (e.g. there are no Monday to Friday TransWilts passenger between 8 a.m. and 6.30 p.m. because there are no trains), but on this site our availability has been very high ... outages / issues on any particular day of the week or at any particular hour of the day are unlikely to have skewed our results, though general server reliability issues over a period in early 2008 depressed usage at that point and has precluded the production or meaningful month by month data parallel to the above.

[inspector_blakey]

In a situation like that I think I'd probably try a different service for searching fares, for example the National Rail website or another TOC^▸ (Train Operating Company) site. Do you know if it was down because the Trainline interface was offline for maintenance, or whether it was an FGW^▸ (First Great Western)-specific shutdown? Even if it was because of the Trainline, you could search fares using a site with the WebTIS booking engine (Chiltern, East Coast and others) if you needed the info in a hurry.