Great Western Coffee Shop

Thanks grahame....treat yourself to an extra sausage😉

Hear Hear! 😃

A handful of ideas

Swanage - extend service to Wareham; add regular trains to provide genuine public transport service along with heritage traffic. If slam-doors are safe for a preserved line, surely they're even safer for the regular user that the line would build up?

Minehead - extend regular service to Taunton.

Didcot - to be the base for a tourist (and I'm looking at tourist from overseas too here!) service from Oxford to Salisbury.

All three of the above are seriously extending the "season" - and I am going so far as suggesting a week-round, year-round operation. That could also apply to Kingswear, where there's an argument for an extension to Newton Abbot, giving a single-change London connection from Kingswear and Churston-for-Brixham.

How to fill platforms, and railway company coffers too!

Give us the trains .... and we'll turn this:

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/turnthis.jpg) into this: (http://www.wellho.net/pix/intothis.jpg)

Two West Wiltshire stations, each serving towns with a population of between 20 and 30 thousand. The biggest difference? One has two trains a DAY each way, and the other has two trains an HOUR each way.

The road network of West Wiltshire is not suitable for longer distance journeys between North and South - and only a huge investment would improve this. What's the point im making that huge investment when there's a perfectly good railway corridor that's underutilised and that people WOULD use.

End of term - don't care

This Monday morning on the Transwilts started with a cancellation - the very first return trip of the week failed to make it, making this (already) the third week out of four that we've suffered cancellations - and we have so few trains anyway that even one round trip cancelled is already a service that's 3.5% down on what it should be - more that twice the objective that's set by the Department for Transport for the operator. Oh - in two of the past weeks, the cancellation rate was around the 10% mark.

This evening, I'll be attending the talk in Trowbridge by the DfT's guy in the South West - the one who's job it is, as I understand it, to represent the region / area to Central government. If I've understood his role correctly, he clearly failed to get out point across strongly enough for it to have any effect on the service's future - decimated next month - and I fear that we'll not get any great sensible change of heart tonight.

It rather seems that the Department for Transport and First Great Western have washed their hands of the TransWilts, and Melksham, and would like us to just fade away. "It's the easiet train for us to cancel" said a First correspondent recently - "we don't care about this service" would have been another way of putting it, perhaps.

Connection Problems

Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later.

Seems to be problems tonight as well. Most pages I try to look at get one of these messages at first. A refresh usually loads the required page.

Odd issue with one table this evening ... may have it fixed; this is a test post.

further testing (please excuse a number of odd posts)

Thanks for your hard work.  Last night I assumed that 'more tables than usual needed updating' and not 'lack of staff due to training'.

GDPR regulations shouldn't affect the Coffeeshop, as I understand it. All members opt-in to whatever service they require from you & email marketing isn't done....

I would say "my pleasure" but actually last night it was just a task that needed to be done!

......

Yes - I appreciate I've come up with a much more serious answer than you would have anticipated from the light hearted and positive comment ... you've provided me with an excellent hook onto which to hang a link to that update previously hidden within a presentation.