Great Western Coffee Shop

Concluding 2023, a big "Thank You" to everyone in the Coffee shop - team of 10 moderators and admin who help me here - in alphabetic order Bobm, Mark A, Phantom, Phil, Red Squirrel, Richard Fairhurst, Rogerw, Timmer, TonyK and Western Pathfinder have all been here within the last five days, and there are a few others who visit us less often these days but with whom we remain in touch and could call on.  Also thank you to the data managers who are experts in their own areas and can fix things within posts.

The admin, moderation and data manager tasks here are a real pleasure. The forum is largely self-administering and of the three parts of the moderation role (helping members, directing conversations and actually dealing with inappropriate activity) the first two pleasurable parts far outweigh the more robust final and occasional one.   For that, thanks to our hundreds of regular and active members.

But the biggest thanks must go to the members - over 13,000 messages have been posted on the Coffee Shop this year in almost 1,300 new threads and countless other continued threads.   As well as our 25,528 threads with 339,466 posts, we have some 1,974 documents in our .pdf archive ranging from a handful of Victorian documents such as The Railways Act of 1845 to December 2023 publications. Search the archive and threads via http://www.passenger.chat/research.html

If you are reading this but are NOT a member, you are welcome to join, and join in. I know that for each member here, there's a large number of guests - many brought to us by search engines or other links looking for a single answer, but some coming back time and again but not taking that step of signing up and contributing.  You can register (here) (http://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?action=register) - or learn more about what it brings you (here) (http://www.passenger.chat/23453). We are also read by a few past members who have moved on in their lives, but come back to look for old times sake - to them I say "you are welcome to log in again and we would love to hear from you / know how you are getting on". If you no longer have access to your login details, please get in touch with me. We do have to do some security checks to relink you back to old accounts, but can make that as easy as possible.

And so to 2024. "If it ain't bust, don't fix it" ... and it ain't bust.  Mind you, we won't be standing still either.  Please keep visiting us - you are our very reason for being here, and having you here brings such pleasure.

Wish I felt I was doing more than turning the electricity meter round.

Its a pleasure,Happy new year.

I'd better say "Happy New Year" to you all now before I break open the bottle of Malbec.
Thanks for making 2023 so much more interesting and entertaining.

JW

And a - Hic...Happy New Year to you and all our members too.

Happy new year to everyone