I'm actually MUCH preferring the rail replacement bus. There seems to be much less chance of last minute cancellations to services to and from Melksham. Timings might be a little bit erratic but at least there's a service. Bus crews actually turn up for duty, amazingly enough. Buses leaving Chippenham seem to be much less prone to suddenly veer off at Thingley and go straight to Trowbridge via Bathampton, Freshford, Bradford on Avon etc. missing out Melksham altogether. Buses leaving Westbury don't suddenly dump passengers at an unstaffed Trowbridge station and instruct them to find taxis or alternative buses to Melksham because they are now apparently heading for Chippenham via Bradford on Avon, Freshford, Bathampton etc.

 

Yep, I know.  We're sending them out but they're not being accepted.  Your email host is a fussy one and even before it gets to your email system it is almost certainly being refused.

 

Nope, still not receiving any email alerts.
Sorry 

 
Engineering works have closed Westbury station up to and including 23rd January, and most of our trains are replaced by buses for the duration. On a beautiful day today, I took a trip to Westbury to see at first hand how it was working, and to refresh my picture library for 2025.

Well - it got me there and worked as it was designed to do, but it makes me very thankful for the much faster and smoother journeys by rail, and having a loo available along the way.   The coach seats were more comfortable than the seats on the train, and the seat pitch felt luxurious.

 
There's a handful of issues arising from last weekend's work (surprised how few there are).

Firstly, our workhorse system IS still emailing messages out. But as it's now a backroom system and not known as "firstgreatwestern.info", various intermediate email relays are a bit worried about it ...
* Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname
* refused to talk to me: 550 Message rejected
* Connection refused
OK - something to work on.  At the weekend?

Second, the workhorse system has for some time had traps in there to row back if it gets silly numbers of requests from a single place. I have had to lift the definition of a "silly" number since nearly all requests are now coming from the receptionist server; ealier today it was screwed down a bit hard and members were being directed to the status server far too often.

Third, our shift from http to https has been noticed by crawlers such as Google. Good, indeed excellent as is means that they are reporting us in searches with an increase prominence.  However, to do so they have been downloading pages with some vigour to ensure they know all about us.  The initial shock in now over - however as I bring in more older resources and new ones [back] online (flows, maps, geolocation, etc) thes is atill going to be the odd load issue.  My monitoting code usually spots problems and lets me know, but that's not instant and there will be occasions where a broad and expensive resource is being indexing and it may cause an issue for a few hours. I DO have plenty of resource with the receptionist and if need be a lot of the public content can be served from there.

Fourth reported:
That was only a warning and you can ignore it.  And I have told the server to now even tell you in the future.  It is / was caused by two visitors at exactly the same time trying to move a log file out of the way - the first succeeds and the second has been grumbling.

Also ... aware of the like system not echoing back in the page, the forum site style not being remembered, and acronyms not being expanded properly.  Searching and the easy access to our industry document archive need a look / check too.

 
Thanks - I've passed that on.

 
Having had a good nose around, there are many destinations away from London/Reading whose current 'normal' advance fares are less than the promotional fares -= especially the longer distance ones into the Southwest & west Wales. Take care!

 

Done.

 
When I clicked on the 'Post' button on the post above, it threw me an error message


I'll leave Graham to work that one out!

 
Matt -
If you can forward that message to me, I can forward to my contact at GWR that is managing the RRS for Westbury to make GWR aware. Their social media ought to know that Faresaver drivers are only just now being informed.

 
The National Rail journey planner: personal experience suggests that for anything other than a straightforward trip, the current implementation struggles. Useability wobbles aside, it would be good to know if the issue is with the journey planner, or the principle of being able to buy a rail ticket between any two stations on the system, or the underlying data, or something else.

I should avoid the example I've just checked - Bath Spa to Kidderminster - as people have helpfully picked the issue to pieces about this time last year - for that one the planner returns a list of times but also 'Not a permitted route', and against each option 'This route may require multiple tickets. Please re-plan your journey' - and in any case fails to find the optimum-priced travel via Bristol and Worcester. BRfares.com does list through prices for that journey, but again, doesn't find the route via Worcester so perhaps this is the underlying data increasingly failing to reflect real-world travel needs.

Mark

https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/

https://www.brfares.com/

 
Cheapest tickets between Bristol and London £21 single.  No big deal about that, as that's the cheapest they are even when the sale isn't on anyway!  I found this to be the case when GWR had a sale last year!

 
Try booking to a destination without reservations available - i.e. Okehampton.

GWRs booking engine throwing an error - instead of booking any seat on stated train, its saying no seat reservable, so I can't sell you a Sale Advance ticket!!

 

 
Checked for my journeys to/from Paddington from BPW for my February trip to Switzerland. £21.00 sale fares available on my chosen trains but the return trip the cheapest was an advance with railcard at £15.95. 

 

Prompt response:

 
between 1995 and 2010 I travelled extensively in the US using all the trans-continentals, some several times (the only exception being San Antonia to New Orleans as each time I carried on to or came from St Louis on the Eagle). Every trip was an absolute joy and I met so many lovely people. All happy experiences and memories.
The only really major delay was on a northbound Coast Starlight with the happy result that we traversed the Cascades by daylight instead of the middle of the night as the schedule in both directions dictated.
Happy Days.
The only other problem was that my itinerary by air often had a 'blank' or missing sector which, after 2001, always turned the spotlight on me and caused very long delays and questioning on each of the other sectors.

 
I flashed my train ticket at the 271 driver this morning, and he let me on, albeit with a resigned shrug of his shoulders. I got the strong impression he wasn't aware of the current scheme. I've emailed Faresaver

 
Sale underway ...



Noting no senior railcard discounts - good price anyway, but with a railcard not always the lowest. I am tempted to make a couple of extra trips which, I suppose, proves their point.

 
Here's another of my finds, from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzO3_ry74uE

32 minutes, well worth watching, features many narrow gauge lines, and very well edited. 

© Lee Andrew Davies 2024

 

Delighted ... shows how wide ranging our code works - not that our user base has many Czech Honour users. I have fond memories from what is now last year of a few days in a hotel in Prague and local trains ...

 
Chrome on my Czech Honour handset which uses Android.

All is good regarding viewing the forum and typing replies. I don't use the farce map or notifications.

 
The Great Western "Coffee Shop" Passenger forum, January 2025

The "Coffee Shop" forum was set up by customers of Great Western Railway (First Great Western at the time - in 2007). The views expressed were and are those of the individual posters concerned; the forum remains independently provided and run by our team of passengers and (subject to agreeing to our forum agreement) is free and open to anyone to register and contribute.

We have started 2025 with a major update ("Mark 2"). We are still online at www.firstgreatwestern.info, also reachable via www.greatwesternrailway.info.   We are now available using https (secure) in addition to http (unencoded) protocols, and most of our content of over 350,000 posts arranged in 25,000 threads can now be read on your small screen device such as a mobile phone. We recommend that for substantial posts you use a larger screen.

So what do you see when you come to https://www.firstgreatwestern.info or https://www.greatwesternrailway.info?



Icons along the top take you to
- Your nearest or home station (the train icon)
- The home page illustrated (the house icon)
- Recently added public posts (the clock)
- The main forum pages (The coffee cup with steam)
- Further links (the links of a chain)
- A page where you can tailor your look and feel (the sewing machine)
- Current train running updates (the gear wheel and alert)
- Our search facility (the magnifying glass)
- A reminder of what these icons all mean (the question mark)
and the word "news" takes you to site news!

---

Following the main forum page link will take you to



Some of the key links for newcomers:
- Your nearest or home station (the train icon)
- The home symbols icon takes you back to the previous (home) page
- The coffee cup symbol with steam rising takes to this top page on the forum
- The Register [here] takes you to the page where you can register to contribute
- you can explore the boards, within them threads, and within them topic lower down the page.

---

And here is what your nearest or home stations will give you



Visit https://www.gwr.com for the official Great Western Railway website.
Visit https://www.greatwesternrailway.info/about.html for our contact details
Visit https://www.greatwesternrailway.info/r1761.html to read our forum agreement and guidelines

 
As this was the named train service it was 'The Flying Scotsman' including the definite article.

The videos of the journey from King's Cross to Edinburgh with GNER in 1999/2000 are available to purchase for download or on DVD from Video 125.

https://www.video125.com/products/flying-scotsman

There are alternative more recent cab ride videos of the ECML on YouTube.

Leeds to KGX - https://youtu.be/vbVs2m0HdhU
KGX to York - https://youtu.be/HWm5huUMxuQ
KGX to Hull - https://youtu.be/5DCGyoWR7m0
Newcastle to Edinburgh - https://youtu.be/fEGOXMW-ZNU

 
I saw it in my YT suggestions a few days ago, the bloke who uploaded it had said it was a ‘historic video’, I assume he wasn’t quite up to speed with copyright law. At that time a couple of comments already mentioned he was wrong to post it.

 
Spotted that.

I guess all that schmoozing at Mayor's conventions at the ratepayers' expense didn't land him a real job then.

Off to the Lords to make up numbers.

 
Back in 2013, I joined a Great Rail 'America Coast to Coast' tour from SanFran to NYC. Amtrak (California) from Oakland to Bakersfield, then (after various road coach journeys) Amtrak from Bakersfield to Chicago; Chicago to Buffalo and finally Niagara USA to Penn station. All very pleasant except the final leg into Penn station. We left Niagara at midday with a scheduled 7pm arrival into Penn station. We finally arrived at 3am the following morning. Apart from several rather long stops for passing freight, we never did find out why we were so late.

 
Wednesday January 1

Alas, the New Year has started badly:

 
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.

 
A few years ago a friend of mine travelled on Amtrak from Chicago to DC.

The loco failed a couple of hours out of Chicago. CSX pushed the Amtrak train into a siding and the Amtrak driver hitchhiked back to Chicago to get another loco. They arrived in DC 12 hours late.