Great Western Coffee Shop

Chatting with a forum member who lives locally 'in real life' the other day, he was commenting how the number of posts reporting / commenting on short forms and cancellatiosn here has dropped. Sadly, I suspect that's because it's no longer news in the way it used to be - news reports highlight the abnormal, and cancellations and short forms have become the new norm.

One of the factors I have noted over the years has been a negative correlation between the numbers of posts and the stability of and satisfaction with the service of our subject - GWR. In other words, as our members become less satisfied, our posts increase and as satisfaction increases, so posts decrease.  Sure, there are other factors - for example, forums are becoming old hat (so I would expect to see post number drop as people move to Twitter and FaceBook) and thinks like the "like" button which immediately decreased posts due to people doing a single click (uncounted as a post) rather than posting the odd word of agreement.    So this table is remarkable - comparing 2018's first six months to the same period in 2017

Posts in the month

-	2017 .........	2018 .........	Growth
June	1334	1852	39%
May	1158	2040	76%
April	1213	2132	76%
March	1796	2361	31%
February	1376	1869	36%
January	1821	2102	15%

I expect to see the percentages drop from this month - simply because it was last summer when things took a dramatic step in the more-pear-shaped direction.

Yet - having written that - it's not all doom and gloom.  I was at my local station this morning, seeing improvements which are not yet completed but are in use, and seeing passengers off for a day out, happy, and on trains with enough capacity and running on time.   And tomorrow I'm planning to take a trip to Weymouth - partly (in should be admitted) for the pleasure, but also to check out how the Heart of Wessex connection is doing, partly to modernise my stock of photos, and partly to research a group trip we've got coming up in August.

I work in IT, and that has always been a 'no news is good news' kind of industry.

Well, there's been quite a lull on the Cotswold line, but that's because there have been no through trains on account of the Oxford blockade for the last fortnight.

Services are back to normal this week, but today there's been a major signalling failure north of Evesham which has trashed the service.

To my surprise, our forum's year on year growth continued through July

Posts in the month

-	2017 .........	2018 .........	Growth
July	2135	2370	11%
June	1334	1852	39%
May	1158	2040	76%
April	1213	2132	76%
March	1796	2361	31%
February	1376	1869	36%
January	1821	2102	15%

Surprised - because last July was when so much started to fall apart - we have now been in a what I would describe as an "unstable railway operation" state for a year.  And this chart is a year on year comparison.   

I would love to see zero growth here in August - but I say that more in hope than expectation of services going right. We probably have many more months before we have a train performance that once again reaches or exceeds target reliability.