So where do we stand 10 years later?  Now in that "medium term".

There is - certainly - no complacency here.  We always expected the most work in the campaign to be the ongoing work and promotion, and once the spotlight moved on to GWR's next projects ... to Okehampton, to Newquay, to Portishead, there was and is a natural easing up of useful attention.   But mind you, the TransWilts line through Melksham no longer has passenger numbers so low that provide a foundation against which others can measure themselves favourably.   We're in with the pack.

Some elements of what has been done have been successful, some less so. I have written some of this up as we look forward to next phases here for the town, helping to inform new team players in a self analysing way so that lessons may be learned. See https://grahamellis.uk/blog1948.html.  I hope enough water has passed under the bridge for them to be read dis-passionatley.  Certainly we are coming up for 12 years later ...

 
I see so many "The Average American has only been to five of these" posts on my social media feed. I feel double fortunate at having been to - typically - between 20 and 25 of the 30 places listed, and in not being American or at least not living there at present - but I should not get political!

Something different - from https://smstone0.github.io




The Outer Isles and Hebrides remain on my bucket list, and I would love to visit (London)Derry at some time and head on into County Donegal too.  Alas, the Burtonport Extension closed many years ago and the cruise we had booked that called at Killybegs has been changed.  I expect on those dates to send you a "where is this" quiz.

I have been fortunate to travel far and wide in the UK in the course of my work, staying a few days up to a week in many beautiful places, with occasional evening opportunities to get a feel for the neighbourhood.  Missing or just-yellow areas are typically closer to home where I've commuted to work.    Score of 332 is,  suspect, rather higher than most members will achieve though I know you're a well travelled bunch.

 
Without inflicting too much information on you here, I have now got my shorts out.

In the sense that I have found them, at the back of the wardrobe, and moved them to the front - ready to be worn at, just for example, any GWR Sunday BBQ to which I might possibly be invited. 

 
My solution to any grey squirrel (bearing in mind their destructive antics on the roof of our previous house in Nailsea, which nearly cost us the sale) would involve a 12-bore.

Apparently, though, that's illegal.

 
…and yet…

There’s some interesting work going on with pine martens, including in the Forest of Dean. They eat greys, but can’t catch reds!

https://www.gwct.org.uk/policy/position-statements/re-introduction-of-pine-marten-in-england/

 
As is so often the case, I stumbled across this historic topic, while I was actually looking for something else, and thought it was worth updating the heading and giving it something of a topical 'bump'.

I used to have a strut from the original garden gate of the Station Master's House at Congresbury (Strawberry Line), and the metal finial of a telegraph pole at Trouble House Halt, on the Kemble - Cirencester Line, both collected while we were out walking our dog at that time.

I'll have a dig around in the garage here, but I rather suspect I will find that my daughter somewhat ruthlessly 'got rid of them', when we downsized house a couple of years ago.

CfN.

 
And now, trespassers.

 
From the BBC:


Well done, Salcombe! CfN.

 
I have known grahame personally for about 18 of those nearly 20 years of the Coffee Shop forum's ongoing life.

He has been an inspiration, mentor and great friend over those years: thank you, grahame, for everything.

Chris from Nailsea.

 
From the BBC:


In the good old days, of course, you could have got to Wadebridge by train ... 

 
Written for a long standing friend with whom I was catching up the other day.



I never expected as a co-founder and technical lead of the "First Great Western Coffee Shop" forum in January 2007 - "by passengers - for passengers of First Great Western" that we would still be running in 2026 and looking forward to our 20th Birthday.  But here we are, May 2026, still running. 150 active members have been logged in this year - half of them in the last 24 hours. Around 4,300 messages posted so far this year out of an absurdly high total of 371,604 as I write!

If you asked me when I set the forum up if it would still be around 20 months later, I would have given it a slim chance - but here we are now in our 20th year. The Coffee Shop HAS changed. 

* We started off as something of a protest group; my local station had just been reduced to two trains each way per day "too early and too late" was the sick joke.   In subsequent years, we moved very much to partnering rather than protesting, though always retaining our independence and being critical friends.  Sadly, I'm finding the pendulum has swung back a little in the last couple of years; long term colleagues and friends have retired, with a team of professional PR staff masking the newer industry experts on board who aren't always fully aware of the needs and desires of the communities they serve.  Talking about an individual station last month (not Melksham) I was disappointed to learn that the professional expert making significant service decisions has never actually visited the station to see for herself.  We have a fine line to balance here, especially as the First Group's tenure of the service operation will be outlasted by the Coffee Shop, and positions and careers in a "re-integrated" railway must be of personal concern to those in roles that have the potential of being duplicated.

* We started off in the days of hideous unreliability and protest groups like "more train less strain" and blogs like "Worst Great Western" and "First Late Western".  Most of them are no more with us as we have seen so many improvements over the years - though there is so much more that could be done and we have seen steps backwards as well as forward.  Our county town of Trowbridge no longer has a through train from London, for example, though it does now have up to 3 trains per hour to Bristol and they are popular.   Online information and ticket booking is so much better, and social media such as Facebook and Twitter/X provide a further enquiry window into the train operators, which very much replaces and so it should - our own question enquiry functions.  JourneyCheck and a multitude of other web sources eliminate the need on many occasions for knowledgeable passengers to have to even enquire of a human, and the majority of ticket booking is now done without human interaction.

* Internet and personal information security has hugely changed. The Coffee Shop has never collected personal information nor taken payments, nor have we ever carried material which is knowingly illegal in any way - abusive, against copyright, etc.  We have always had a strong team of moderators who pick up the rare issues we have very fast indeed, and that team has developed as things like GDBR, Online Safety and cookie laws have changes - in most cases only reflecting what in any case has been our good practise; we have adjusted how we monitor / log our watching over such things, so that we can provide proof if ever asked for it.   

* Part of the changes in the "security" field has been the move from the http to the https protocol - Hypertext Transfer Protocol and the "S" means secure.  As we only really carry public board traffic, the need for "S" was more to re-assure people (sure, personal messages could have been intercepted if anyone was interested at our WSP!). Technical issues on the move were significant, with our original software being so out of date that it won't upgrade easily - a problem shared with other forums, we note.  They have gone so far as to restart with fresh databases and a clear history; we have wrapped our "worker" server in a "receptionist shell which handles the secure layer, provides a lot of cached responses, and filters out the vast noise of unwelcome automata that crawl sites while letting through the welcome ones.  Our "Receptionist / worker" model is working well - looking at yesterday, our receptionist got 440,000 requests of which 217,000 were passed on to our worker system.

* We have moved from minicomputers to tablets and phones, and from browsers that display data to much more intelligent apps, but on much smaller screens. A problem for our old worker software, but we have added a reader's layer on the receptionist; far from ideal at present but something that could be developed into the future.

* These days, we have a long-established regular membership and we're much more a club of people we know well, meet online and share interests.  We digress into wider areas - travel and transport outside the (F)GW(R) area, and away from trains into buses, cycling and ferries and we have a "heritage" interest too.   In very early days, we had an exuberant membership of younger railway enthusiasts who, however, moved on to other more specialist fora which had their train enthusiasm, rather than the general traveller's interests, in their hearts.  Some of them found our level of questions and knowledge frustrating low, and at times that level, and our team's insistence that discussions and members at any level were welcome, and they moved on - in a couple of cases being obliged to do so when they let their frustration get the better of them.  Also looking back 20 years, all of the members who joined in the first years are now nearly 20 years older.  Life changes, and many of them are no longer regular train users.  Sadly, some have passed away and it's the nature of a forum such as this that we tend not to hear when a member is no longer around.  On the other hand, no fewer than 58 members who joined us over 15 years ago are among the 150 who have been logged in this year.

* As well as members, guests visit us and are welcome. I estimate that over 90% of our posts are public. Whilst it's difficult to separate out the human guest browsers from the automata traffic at times, our Google Analytics suggests around 600 visits in the last week from different real guests in the UK.  That number makes sense - we have such a database of information these days that when I search the world wide web for a "rail in the south west" type topic, I often find myself recommenced to (or quoted from) an old Coffee Shop thread.

* As I write, our servers are running sweetly (famous last words!), with the worker running 40 days without a pause, and the receptionist for 161 days.  I do keep an eye on disc storage and take frequent backups local to the servers, and download copies from time to time.  That's not a 100% guarantee against failures;  a configuration change at our WSP put us offline for 4 hours in March, and looking back to March last year a server crashed (a power failure at our WSP while I was away) enforced a rebuild that took 36 hours to fully restore.  By nature, things like this, more clever denial of service attacks, and other things changes to data feeds that we use to provide dynamic reports will come out of the blue, and by Murphy's law at the worst possible time too.  We also had one of our WSPs sell off their hosting business and while we were able to transfer, I'm nervous at some elements of the technical support that the new team provides.

* The Coffee Shop is a members forum. It's here for the members and guests and would not be here without you.  All members are friends too - and amongst those friends are the moderator and admins team A big ongoing "thank you" to all. Without you, the Coffee shop would indeed have been that 20 week project in 2007. 

And so - what for coming years?   Well - I look forward to the next decade here.  By the end of that time, I'll be in my 80s, with a project that I started at age 52 - and the rest of the team has similarly matured too. We do have some newer members and moderators but the software is way up the garden path (it was never intended to last this long!) and would be difficult for others to pick up.  I have lived with it (and similar software) for so long that my years of intimate knowledge means I can nip an issue in 5 minutes that other would need a length study into - and we do not have a funded / paid admin team who can be re-reimbursed to study and retain the knowledge ahead of time. Mentally, I remain AOK; medically some issues have surfaced over the last five weeks, but nothing that's, as yet, a terminal diagnosis and I DO look forward to all those years ahead.  Much else has been given up as I wind down but the Coffee Shop remains - well - I am reminded of the words or W H Auden - "...  my North, my South, my East and West, my working week and my Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song".

This time next week, I will be in Belgium.   In two weeks, I will be in Denmark.  I will have my new "baby" Duckworth with me - minimalist Mac Neo that'll help ensure that I'm online anywhere from Aalborg to Zwolle and places between as usual. "Steady as she goes" with the Coffee Shop. Further forward - a flurry of projects once my travels are over (and there's more after Denmark).

Thank you for reading (if you have, rather than just skipping to the conclusion).  Writing has helped me set a "checkpoint" - noting where we are, why we are here and thinking forward though not putting fully into words where we may be in the future.

Edits - various typo correction in what may turn out to be a piece I keep referring back to - grahame

 
From the BBC:

 
From the BBC:

 

Yes, I would expect the early 2030s.  Which to be fair does tie in nicely with the expected life cycle of many of the trains which will be replaced, like the 150s/158s/165s and 166s GWR operate.

 
"Locomotive Services Limited’s preserved Class 142 No 142003" (from Modern Railway magazine.)

Mark

 
Inside an [img tag



[Right click on photo original, copy the photo url link, paste inside the [img brackets]

 
Where did they find the orange Class 14x, presumably mainline certified? Why did GWR not (attempt) to provide the rolling stock, especially since Mark Hopwood was present?

 
Cancellations to services between London and Reading

Due to a broken down train between London Paddington and Reading some lines are blocked.
Train services running to and from these stations may be cancelled, delayed by up to 15 minutes or revised. Disruption is expected until 14:00 02/05.

 
May 2nd. Checking the bus company web sites, Faresaver, yes. Other bus company sites, with regards to this major work, still  tumbleweed.

On the plus side, though I've not checked if they've been installed: there was a delivery of new seating to the bus station, hopefully to replace the seating that was removed/broke. Most of the missing seating is at the end served by buses to the hospital, which turned it into a bit of a tough environment for people unable to stand for long, not ideal.

Mark

 
Article in the Guardian on the indefinite pause to the start of passenger services.

Mark

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/may/02/east-west-rail-oxford-milton-keynes-chiltern-railways-delays

 
From what I can work out from RealTimeTrains, a Didcot - Paddington train was terminated in Platform 15. IIRC that train to Gatwick usually comes off the depot into Platform 15, so had to navigate other trains when it was altered into Platform 14 (at Reading).

 

The main line from Bristol to London via Bath is closed this weekend between Bath and Chippenham, and a London express that was due to start from Chippenham was delayed there and started 22 minutes late (no reason given that I could see), holding up the train from Westbury.


Most of the time made up - that ran within 5 minutes of plan

 

Indeed ... life would be so much easier if "we" could set realistic rather than optimistic dates for things!    This competition is not (IMHO) a biggie - it's not part of a bigger scheme that I'm aware of which will fall like a pack of cards because of the delay - in fact I had almost-forgotten my submission which I felt was a lovely picture but perhaps too wide of the message target that the competition setters had in mind.

Sorry Phil - I am having a negative day.     Quite separate from this competition, I have been submitting requests for help / match funding for "Information at the Station" which is a passionate project that will meet so many objectives it has to be believed.    No individual funding source is vital / a show stopper; we have a published list of a dozen prospects, and to some extent the hassle of applying and self-analysis is really good in testing our resolve.  But - really - dates and deadlines!

One organisation we have applied to for help had a mid-April deadline.  Fair enough.   They then pulled back the deadline to 16th March with a decision date of 23rd March. Yike, panic, but 8 pages of questions and six supporting documents supplied.   Then on 19th March they wrote "We regret to inform you that the planned grants meeting on Monday 23rd March 2026 has been cancelled. The meeting has been rescheduled for Monday 22nd June 2026."  Well - that weakened our case for other match funders - we could only say "applied" and not "agreed" and since then, the organisation we were matching has said "no". Far from a show stopper;  I do know it was close, and have to wonder if the match would have tipped the balance.

Guess what - received on Friday - "The meeting to discuss the grants will take place on Monday 8th June 2026 from 6pm to 7pm ... It is strongly recommended a representative from your organisation attends the meeting to discuss your application". An email from me has clarified that this replaces the 22nd June meeting.  Personally, I'll be away in the middle of a trip that's been planned for a while; almost inevitably someone can stand in ... I'm sure we're not the only community members inconvenienced by this to and fro, and I wonder at what organisational and time costs too.

Hey, ho ... it appears that the switch form 22nd to 8th June is for their convenience ... and I suspect that the switch from March to June might have something to do with shifting it into the next financial year.  The whole story is such a reminder to treat everything as provisional until it actually happens!

 
07:45 Westbury to Swindon due 08:28
07:45 Westbury to Swindon due 08:28 is being delayed at Chippenham.
This is due to congestion.

08:44 Swindon to Westbury due 09:25
08:44 Swindon to Westbury due 09:25 will be starting late from Swindon.
This is due to congestion.

 

Easter's late again this year, I see 

 

Not seen this reason before. Where is the congestion; Reading, Guilford, Redhill or Gatwick?

 
ITV west covered as their lead story at 6pm and BBC covered it as well on their 6.30pm local news.

You have 24 hours only to catch up on the local news on the i-player thingy

 
This thread will be 3 years old this month.

Some talk and rumours .... yes

Order placed and trains in build .... nope

Current status after 3 years : not even an invitation to tender

Is it just me, or does it seem to anyone else also think, that any new trains will not be in 2020s, and could be (at least) half a decade away

 
I wonder if it'll make much difference to its (very low) usage?

https://www.railwaydata.co.uk/stations/overview/?NLC=3588#google_vignette

 
Attempting to pay for a ticket today (Frome - Bath Spa single) and having gone though all the stages as far as 'Pay' - with a card saved on the app and which had seen a previous successful transaction - it implacably refused to activate the 'Pay now' button. I've been back through things and can't spot why that is. It's still refusing to purchase the ticket. (I'm at home now, mind...)

Mark