Meet the Manager - in fact "Meet the Managing Director" - online on the Coffee Shop forum

I (GrahamE writing) am pleased to announce a further "Meet the Managing Director" session live on this forum, to run from 17:00 to 18:00 on Tuesday, 5th November 2019. 

All members are welcome to submit questions - please send them to user "moderators" which the admins have specially set up for the purpose. The "best" questions will be sent on a week ahead of the session to Mark Hopwood's team so that - once again - discussions on subjects important to our members can be seeded with considered responses to fuel the discussions on the day.

Questions which don't make the "cutoff" for addressing during the interactive session will be forwarded to the GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) team for further written answers, which we will publish here.  This was the intent last time too, but issues at our forum end lead to it failing to happen.  Members are welcome to resubmit questions on matters which weren't raised during the August session - however, we (the moderator team) won't be selecting issues already aired in the previous interactive session - better to use Mark's valuable time to address fresh issues than churning over old matters.

The session is intended to look forward to service changes in December and what happens thereafter, however that does not mean that more general questions aren't also welcome.  To help inform our team of what questions are of wide interest, our Frequent Poster survey ( http://www.passenger.chat/22199 )last month suggested a number of areas of potential interest:
91% - Will you have enough trains and staff? 
74% - How are you following up - right length trains, tuning, changes in May 2020, DA3, etc
48% - How are you balancing speed v reliability of service and connections?
26% - Is everything coming in at once or are there some phased introductions?
26% - What's the prognosis for ongoing engineering and holiday provision, e.g. this Christmas / New Year?
17% - How / how much / what are your plans for future special events
Should no question at all be submitted on the first couple of topics here, we'll make sure that we "seed" something appropriate - we want to avoid the "Strictly" problem of no-one asking the key questions because everyone thinks tat someone else is sure to have done so. (Caught us last time!).

Submissions close - end of Sunday 27th October 2019.

Date for your diary - November 5th, at 17:00.  Useful discussion anticipated - Red Squirrel will be igniting each of the fireworks, Bobm will be overseeing the show with GWR in Swindon, and GrahamE will be safety marshal with a bucket of sand and an extinguisher which - on past form - he expects to sit here and not be required.