About the Coffee Shop Forum
• We opened in 2007 and our forum is still here. Latest topics:at 21:57: Vivarail chosen for fast charging trial on the Greenford branch
at 19:44: Welfare Reform bill protest at Liverpool Lime Street - July 2025
at 18:18: Thames Valley infrastructure problems causing disruption elsewhere - 2025
... more
Originally the "First Great Western Coffee Shop Forum" and now the "Great Western Railway Coffee Shop Forum", we have 359861 posts of which 32 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:
XRe: Vivarail chosen for fast charging trial on the Greenford branch
: XRe: Welfare Reform bill protest at Liverpool Lime Street - July 2025
: XRe: Thames Valley infrastructure problems causing disruption elsewhere - 2025
PRe: 2025 - Service update and amendment log, Swindon <-> Westbury
: \Re: "Off on my travels again"
: : : : : : : NRe: 30 cancellations on the North Downs this morning
: : : qRealtime Tickets
: : : : : : : RRe: More 4 car 158s for Portsmouth services
: : {1;0,!} [guest] (a shift)• If you scroll down, you'll find a feed about our forum news.
• And you can jump using the icons at the top of the page
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.
