I realise this is a FGW▸ board but as I live in South Wales the majority of trains I use are ATW▸ (and TBH▸ I prefer ATW over FGW) so unless we can have an ATW coffee shop sub forum?
I've been asked before about providing boards relating to other Train Operating Companies and
I keep telling people there's no demand for it 
. But seriously, the business I work in was started off because of three requests for a product that sounded far more outrageous than this, and I am fully aware of the need.
The "First Great Western Coffee Shop" has a clear demarkation at the edges of the frachise and that was something that was a very clear decision when we started up here - other such as railchat and commuterjunction and ticketcollector have gone wider. They also have other approcaches / policies; we're for the passenger and for reasoned discussion to the exclusion of getting personal - they may (or may not) allow some of that, and are much more for staff and / or enthusiasts. And this was actually discussed by the majority of moderators earlier today.
The overwhelming concensus is that we welcome posts that cover journeys by other operator's services that start / end / go through FGW served stations. We're pretty much where we feel it's best for us to be, but we are happy to make tweaks and will be doing so. Adding an ATW forum would then lead us to add an
SWT▸ forum and a
TFL▸ one perhaps - then an
AXC» one and so it would go. And we don't have the time / resources to diversify into that, not do we wish to dilute the current concentration to areas that, frankly, the current team may not know very well - sorry.
But I can offer four options.
* You are very welcome indeed to post on / in "South Wales journeys" (and I can take out the work local if you like for ATW matters.
* You are also welcome to post on
our Save the Train Great Britain board, which is a newsreel of issues across britain that are of genertal interest
* You could set up your own ATW equivalent of this site, but be warned that's an awful lot of time being taken.
* You could approach me / my company and contacts to ask about setting up and/or hosting and/or advising on a similar site to this one but for ATW. This would require some sort of financing, and you would still need to do a lot of work on content and operation to have it take off. We are helped by FGW having got themselves such a dreadful reputation and discontended customer base; ATW come higher in all the leagues that I have seen.
