Logic is to ask the train manager if I can get off at St Erth.  Unlikely to refuse and it's then done with permission, so allowed.

Will take a look - but I suspect the advance/sale fare does not allow me to end my journey before my ticketed station?  I remember someone getting into serious trouble buying a "This train only" London to Southampton Central ticket and getting off at Eastleigh.

Perhaps if we had a member who played the violin it might be a bit lighter ...

Great minds!

Undoubtedly it remains good value and indeed one would expect it to rise in line with rail fare inflation.   Where these things need a degree of care is that other changes don't quietly get sneaked in at the same time.  Ticket types where they don't apply, new tighter time restrictions, minimum fare conditions, reduced discount levels, only apply to online ticket purchases, must not be a UK^▸ (United Kingdom) resident, must live near to a station that is within the area of validity, must buy a reservation, not valid when travelling with a bicycle, delay/repay not available, no "get you there" guarantee, etc.

The "News Now" feed at the top of our old desktop editing pages, and in the external links section of the new site that works much better on smaller (phone) screens provides an ongoing feed of travel and transport news with a UK^▸ (United Kingdom) (though not exclusively UK) slant]






Top stories:


Detailed feed:


Feed direct link at https://www.newsnow.co.uk/h/UK/Travel+and+Transport/Rail

Will be there if I can - indeed celebrating the return of a decent train service to Melksham for the first time this year.   Work remains to be done in getting efficiently around the WECA^» (West of England Combined Authority - about) / Wessex area (Western Gateway) ... but at least it's possible to attend without a car

I take a back seat interest in the old souther diesel electric units - including the 2 and 3 car "Hampshire" units, the 6 car "Hastings" ones and the "Tadpoles"

From Facebook - a public post but (help!) it moved on before I copied the URL.

.

Really good to see the Hasings units still active on the main line and a sufficient number of power cars available to provide a safety net and keep operational as they need ongoing maintenance or wait for specialist parts to be sourced / made into the future.

From the BBC^» (British Broadcasting Corporation - home page)

It's coping much better this morning - and 2 out of every 3 requests are being answered from the receptionist's cache.    Overall Coffee Shop requests yesterday (until 03:30 this morning):
307,599 requests to receptionist
231,213 of those forwarded by receptionist to worker
a further 20,396 direct to worker

There is other traffic on both machines - total web requests including other sites:
recpeptionist - 468,360
worker - 303,582
and as you might expect in any working relationship, there is other common reference to the same shared data sets out of the public (web) view.

Overall news for our users - steady as she goes.  Main stuff looking good for the future.

Please forgive me logging far more than is really useful to most of our members - it helps keep me sane(r) and be explaining what I am doing and why, it warns me if I'm doing something pretty darned crazy and helps me then make better choices.

I have ... but this came as no surprise - in fact I'm glad I didn't have to start throttling it back.   

Roughly what I might have expected, with rail replacement buses carrying only a fraction of what the trains normally carry.  An known the the 272,272 and 273 buses (as well as the x34 which was the only one originally planned) are accepting rail tickets that will b depressing RRB^▸ (Rail Replacement Bus) numbers all th more.

The web site has been running very slowly today due to being very heavily loaded.   It's already started to improve and will do so even more during the night

I'm the one to "blame" - I added the 2023/24 passenger flow database to the five previous years which we already had, and I made their analysis https (secure), obvious and crawlable.  Ouch!

There are (only) so many possible pages, so I have our receptionist server caching them each time it passes back a new response in case it's called up again - it's so much more efficient to say "I know that one' rather than "I will ask for you".    At 3 O'clock this afternoon, all enquires were new and being passed through at great loads on the worker.  By 10 p.m., 11,000 requests had been made and already around 50% are being answered "trivially" from cache by the receptionist.   There IS some capacity on the worker (and plenty if we need it on the receptionist) so the issues of the last few hours are (as planned  ) on their way to being resolved.

We have another similar issue in due course in a couple of weeks time when I add in all the bus stops!

Ticket flow data for the 2023/24 year now added to the databases -  they are reachable through the maps and also via URLs using codes such as TAU^» (Taunton - next trains) for Taunton - https://www.greatwesternrailway.info/TAU.html ... with 8 million records in the database you may initially find some of these a bit slow to load.  I have asked our receptionist server to cache enquires so they can be quickly answered, but it will be learning for a day or two, I sustpect.