Happy New Year to all of our members and our guests.  We're celebrating our 18th birthday, and the 200 birthday of passenger travel by mechanically propelled train later this year.  And we are seeing major changes in the regulation of the bus and rail industries in the UK, and indeed in many other aspects of life which will affect public and private transport.  We are also seeing environmental changes, with Edinburgh celebrations cancelled last night, the Highland main line and the Far North line closed due to weather and the damage it has caused.   Altnabraec and Kingussie may feel a long way away but we've had, and will continue to have, our turn too.

I often measure Coffee Shop activity by the number of posts and the number of new threads - easy stats provided by the software that have some sort of meaning, and in 2024 we have grown steadily:



In some ways, the growth is a cause for celebration - we as a forum are here, useful, wanted (otherwise people would vote with their fingers).  But I believe it also indicates a cause for concern as our members talk about the failure of the railways to deliver a service that's "boringly consistent and appropriate" which would slash our contributions - that would be good for the public but bad (?) for us.

For the record on this thread,  the forum always goes quieter over the Christmas period (Christmas Day and Boxing Day traffic typically around 25% of a regular day's member activities) and in 2024 I took the forum down for 48 hour for major engineering works.  Well - that's how long I said it would be, but pre-planning and some luck allowed it to be back up and running well within the time I had given myself.   On a major software restructure, I would often expect to see some attrition with it taking time to recover (if it does) to previous levels - though I am optimistic as I look at how it is going.   I will be happy if January 2025 brings us over 1,000 posts, which I believe to be a very achievable target.