About the Coffee Shop Forum
• We opened in 2007 and our forum is still here. Latest topics:at 12:40: Train hits tractor and trailer on level crossing 22/05/2025.
at 11:24: Announcement - Billions of investment on tram, train and bus projects.
at 08:37: To Ukraine by plane and train New topic!
... more
Originally the "First Great Western Coffee Shop Forum" and now the "Great Western Railway Coffee Shop Forum", we have 358942 posts of which 31 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.
Read about how the forum works. If and you would like to join in, please register here
Status:
qRe: Train hits tractor and trailer on level crossing 22/05/2025.
: fRe: Announcement - Billions of investment on tram, train and bus projects.
: : : rTo Ukraine by plane and train
JRe: Night Riviera Sleeper train - between Paddington and Penzance
: rRe: German experience - not quite as punctual as its old reputation would suggest
rRe: To Aachen and back- by train
ZRe: Coventry - Very Light Railway - merged posts
: XRe: Thames Valley infrastructure problems causing disruption elsewhere - 2025
: ZRe: East - West Rail update (Oxford to Bedford) - ongoing discussion
: : : : : : rRe: European Passengers Federation - 13th and 14th June 2025
: : BRe: Rail firms accused of misusing courts for ticket errors / fare evasion (merged posts)
: : fRe: Sodium-ion batteries and battery swapping stations
PRe: Melksham's rail service - where are we, on the anniversary of being Beechinged?
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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.
