About the Coffee Shop Forum
• We opened in 2007 and our forum is still here. Latest topics:at 19:55: First Class or Standard Class - Interrail pass thoughts New topic!
at 19:51: Driving licences and tests - ongoing discussion
at 16:34: North Cotswold line delays and cancellations - 2025
... more
Originally the "First Great Western Coffee Shop Forum" and now the "Great Western Railway Coffee Shop Forum", we have 358850 posts of which 37 are new posts yesterday and today. The Coffee Shop is run by a team of public transport passengers, for passengers. We are free and independent. Views expressed are the views of individual contributors. Webmaster email - admin@railcustomer.info in the event of any issues.
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Status:
BFirst Class or Standard Class - Interrail pass thoughts
qRe: Driving licences and tests - ongoing discussion
LRe: North Cotswold line delays and cancellations - 2025
hRe: 25th May 2025 - SWR Franchise expires and services Nationalised
. SRe: New station at Ashley Down, Bristol
PRe: 2025 - Service update and amendment log, Swindon <-> Westbury
?Re: Interrail, summer 2025 - daily diary thread of our travels
mITV West feature on West Somerset railway
rtravel show on BBC news featured Paris metro
: : : : : : : PRe: Go-Op Cooperative - proposals for additional rail services
mRe: Steam excursion - except there's much more diesel than steam!
FRe: Sad death of Shirley Pope, 82, and her dog, hit by train on foot crossing at Pewsey, Feb 2025
: : : XRe: Thames Valley infrastructure problems causing disruption elsewhere - 2025
oBBC 'Train drivers have best office in the world' - driver based in Westbury
: : : BRe: Is playing music on public transport "Chipping away at Society"?
: {3;3;} [guest] (4 hours)• If you scroll down, you'll find a feed about our forum news.
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News Feed
Updated 27th May 2025
All running sweetly - no site news changes in a while.
On 25th March at around 06:15, our cloud server hosted in a London data centre suffered a power outage. Usually these things come straight back up but in a cruel twist of fate, updates were being written at the instant the power failed to the extent that severe damage was done to the disc image. Service restored, read only, that afternoon with full return the following day (26th March). No posts were lost - a good test of our backups, and good practise to check that these systems were in place.
Following our late 2024 restructure, we are now running using https (secure) protocols. We are moving towards responsive formats to make the site more friendly when used on smaller screens such as phones, but still giving the same access to over 25,000 user-contributed threads of data.
This graphic shows how we have moved on from a single server to a reception and worker set up, with a surge of access once we changed over - mostly explained by search engines re-indexing us.As we upgrade and modernise the protocols, we are making a number of other changes over coming months. We hope you enjoy new Coffee Shop experiences and continue to be comfortable in the well established ones. The Coffee Shop continues to be free to use and free of adverts. We are here for the public transport passenger, and independent.
Please get in touch with the team in the event of any issues - our users are our lifeblood.
Ready for 2025
We have undertaken a major restructure of the Coffee Shop Forum in the final days of 2024. The Forum is up and running again for 2025 with the same familiar look and feel, and databases too. You will find that there are a few internal changes and things still to be checked out / debugged in the new structure - please report these is not already noted on the forum. The biggest change you'll see is that we're now using secure (https) protocols.
