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.

 
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