"The Coffee Shop" is 2 years old next Wednesday! And we have grown from nowhere to a board with approaching 500 members, with over 33,000 posts and this will be something like the 4000th subject. And my original post is just as relevant today:
This site has been set up for CUSTOMERS and WANNABE Customers of First Great Western so that they can exchange views, stories, suggestion - with the ultimate objective of making positive feedback, actually having the customer listened to and heeded and perhaps coming up with a better rail service for us, and one that's better for the operator, the economy and the environment too.
Apart from being an FGW▸ customer, the operators of this site have no links commercial links with the company
And it went on to talk about how a sparse, but appropriate service from Swindon to Salisbury and Southamapton had been withdrawn the previous month, in spite of rapid growth in the previous three years - "use it OR loose it" we had been told, "use it AND loose it" is what they had done to it. We (the people who use the stations on the line and used the service) felt, frankly, lied to, deceived and shafted.
A lot has changed in two years. The small green shoot of a single extra service each week (and when you only have two on a Sunday, a rise to three is significant in percantage terms) on the "TransWilts". And we have seen many other improvements in the FGW area too - a restoration of 3 car trains on Portsmouth - Cardiff, dramatic improvements to Severn Beach and Newquay, and others too. And during those two years this board has providing an information exchange and a discussion point and has (I understand) been read by some of the 'movers and shakers'. I would like to think that some of the moving and shaking they have done may have been influenced, just a little, by one or two of the ideas they have read here.
I also know that I have learned a lot - my huge thanks to all of those, including the professional who post here, who have helped me and many like me understand 'how trains work' - so that we can make the best of travel opportunities and good value fares where available, so that we can understand (and be more sympathetic and perhaps more helpful) when things go wrong, and so that wehen we make suggestions and ask for things, we're not wasting people's time with daft ideas but rather coming up with sensible suggestions. Directly, such suggestions are focused on getting a better deal for the passenger - that's our remit - but indirectly a happy and well served community of passengers should also be good news for the Train Operating Company - a spirit of working together rather than the passenger being merely the commodity that is to be moved.
Please don't expect any major changes at "The Coffeeshop" to be coming with this two year message because, if you do, you'll be disappointed. It's much more a question of moving gently forward. Our policies and techniques have served us well - however, what is appropriate with 20 or 30 posts a day and a database on 400 threads may be less so with over 100 posts on many days, and a database of 10 times than number of articles. We've turned into something of a reference resource, and it gets harder (even for that excellent team of moderators, who's praises I can't sing enough!) to keep up to date and the subjects crisp. So one of the more minor changes you will see over coming weeks is a little more cross-referencing, and a little more locking of duplicated threads with a link on to a single discussion point. This isn't changing any rules about what can be posted - rather, it's rearranging where things are posted, just a little, so that we'll still be a valid resource in two years time and - if FGW (or
SWT▸ ) hasn't put on a more appropriate TransWilts service, we'll still be able to put the case for the sort of service level that (with amazingly few dissenters) should be provided.
