Great Western Coffee Shop

A question / comment to me (personally, in real life) suggested that the same old 10 names make up the vast majority of the posts on the forum day to day. The question was also asked if the reliability problems at Melksham have been sorted.

1st and 2nd November 2019, I've looked at some figures.

1271 Coffee Shop visits (sessions)
610 visitors on the Coffee Shop
294 of them new visitors
133 of them logged in members
107 messages posted
40 different members posted

34 trains due to call at Melksham
3 of them failed to call

Analysis ... for every member, there are four others - guests - reading the forum. Data check ... I can believe that figure; it's not unusual for someone to come up and talk to me at a meeting or when I'm out and about and tell me how much they appreciate reading the forum - although they've not joined us as members.  Looking at where those visitors have come from, 90% are UK and mapped out:

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/nov_scatter.jpg)

The numbers are likely, if anything, to be low for an average 48 hour period rather than high, simply based on the fact that Saturday is routinely quieter than other days of the week.  And no breaking rail news to drive numbers up.

Now - Melksham reliability stats. A sample size of just 3 cancellations is statistically insignificant, I will admit.  But having only 91.2% of trains running is a horrid figure when anything under 98% is really a shocker and out of spec. I do have somewhat wider data as I have set up a site that scrapes data feeds, from which I report back to TransWilts each month.  For October, 26 out of 528 were cancelled - running rate of  95.2%.  For the final full week in October it slipped - 17 out of 119 cancelled; 85.7% running rate.  For a school exam, figures hovering around 90% sound reasonable.  For a commuter, they mean one journey cancelled every week and at Melksham there's only occasionally another one along within even an hour.  The franchise target is being missed by a factor of five times.

That's intriguing - where do our 10% of overseas visitors come from?

I have taken a look back at the data - actually 92% UK over the 2 days. 6% USA, 0.5% Germany and the final 1.5% is in single visits ranging from Ireland to Russia and from China to France.

The high USA figure is likely explained by users on big international company corporate networks who use their internal VPNs to access the net, popping out onto the web proper at their USA HQ.    On my "day job" I have trained in Weybridge and in Dublin ... checked my online web sites and find they've interpreted me as being in Colorado, and in California.

That'll be me then at work. I really should cut back on my visits!

Now 84 members have posted ... coming up for 10 days.
23 of those with just a single post in that time.