Yesterday, I attended Great Western Railway's Community and Stakeholder Conference in Swindon, along with perhaps 200 others.   These are / have been incredibly worthwhile events - to hear an learn what the GWR and Network Rail Western ROute teams are thinking, to be introduced to a number of projects they are highlighting, and to network with long established friends - catching up with a few words in person is so valuable - and making new ones.

By its nature, this is designed as being a positive event to motivate the room full of advocates for rail; very serious issues are raised / commented on / acknowldeged, but that's not the overall gloss of the day.  Unpaid volunteers / advocates do so much for rail - mention was made of £18 of benefit for every £1 spent on us - we are cheap support and marketing for the rail industry.

During the day at these conference, I type notes on my laptop and take photo.  I have published those at https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/coffeeshop/index.php?topic=32194 which is a "frequent poster" topic on our forum.  Nothing inhetently secret in there (and you may quote bits of it) but roughly written and I may have missed some key points and got soem wrong.

Some big take-aways
* There is a lot to do, and lots of good intent and lots of analysis
* How that good intent will be followed into action is unclear/unknown
* There are massive advocates of rail and passenger transport is still very important
* There are so many really good people trying to do jobs hamstrung byb controls and circumances
* There are many things we in the community may not consider / understand
* We need to look after and adovacate for our own stations, towns, regions
* We can too easily loose the wider plot if we argue over differences of how to achieve results
* We can't do / have done everything we want - lack of resource
* There are quick wins to be had, but sometimes hard to convince people
* I think we have/had excellent leads with some frustations from GWR when part of First
* With short term contract extensitons since 2013 - looking long term has been difficult
* I look forward with some trepidation to the nationalised operator future









I / we are promised a slide set from the day and I will share that for Coffee Shop members as it becomes available.    If you are not a Coffee Shop member,  please note that we are free and independent forum (run as a hobby thing by a fabulous team of moderators, admins and members, and we would welcome you to join and contribute if you wish.  Once you have made a few posts and established that you are legit, you'll automatically become a member of "frequent posters" and able to see and comment on things like my full notes mentioned earlier in this thread.    Register at this link