An Introduction

@FGW advantage of Twitter is hopefully we can encourage more people to complain and one day you'll get your act together…

— Alasdair Buchan (@alasdair_buchan) October 9, 2012

Here is a site, hastily thrown together to combat ever-increasing anger at First Great Western (FGW) Great Western Railway (GWR) and their woeful excuse for a train service. For several years, this company has executed a service equivalent to shoving a glass bottle up the passenger’s bottom, then repeatedly kicking the glass bottle, then asking for all the passenger’s money.

@fgw – i found you. read my previous tweets. also have you ever searched 'first great western' on twitter? your awfulness is general opinion

— geortorious b.i.g (@GFCTHOMAS) October 29, 2012

The website has been described as containing “drivel” and “insignificant statistics”, which is great!

When you get so fed up, it helps to take a look at other opinions. In this instance, the ratio of positive to negative feedback about this company is very clear. Feel free to trawl the bowels of The Internet yourself. Eagle-eyed readers will notice the website spans thousands of complaints from thousands of passengers, over several pages and several years.

Snippets, images, twits, whatever found on the site are from several different people, and they are from a period covering several months. Only a fool would infer a connection between all entries, or blame a single event. The one consistent factor is FGW GWR and their reliably bad service, followed by copy and paste, half-arsed online apologies. We await a conspiracy theory that we have somehow invented all of these people. Or that National Rail, the Department For Transport, or passengers is responsible for every event.

Through this site we hope to raise greater awareness of the dreadful services provided, at a profit-making premium, by First Great Western.

A very polite FGW GWR employee – no sarcasm – contacted us to ask what our agenda was. This was a little harder to define than we thought at first, so hopefully this will clear things up a little. In summary, the agenda behind this website is to:

• Stop passengers from being unnecessarily delayed
• Prevent passengers from being crushed
• (Ultimately) reduce grumbling to the subject of ticket prices and the weather

Currently the website is attempting to shout about FGW GWR and echo complaints from customers. At some point in the future, we may move to something less shouty, but a lot depends on whether or not FGW can actually live up to any of their promises of improving services. Perhaps we’ll grow tired of shouting and break the website into 800 e-mails to send to Mark Hopwood, The Department for Transport, Passenger Focus, and Network Rail. We haven’t thought that far ahead. So in the short term, we’ll bang pots and pans.

We like to believe that customers – and FGW GWR staff – aren’t a bad bunch. On both sides there will exist a minority of idiots. We also like to believe that customers have some degree of understanding that things do occasionally go wrong.

To everyone featured here – thank you.

Our polite contact from FGW GWR was offended by a Tweet we sent out a while back, and we took some time to reflect on that. We don’t intend to either specifically or accidentally offend anyone personally here. Even the FGW Management team, well, perhaps Horatio Hopwood; he’s ultimately The Big Cheese, and The Buck stops with him! We just want to see some positive change, reflected by online passenger feedback and the few stats we track. Then we can all be happy, right? Unfortunately this may embarrass the FGW management. If you follow FGW complaints through Twitter, you’ll see a lot of things we don’t include here as the overstep a few marks, arbitrarily set by ourselves. If FGW can have arbitrary travel standards, we can have arbitrary moral standards!

The web site contains a mixture of opinion, parody, sarcasm, humour, fact, and images. Interpretation of all content is down to you, the reader! We don’t endorse anything ever, apart from Iams cat food.

So, First Great Western, you can Rebrand, but you can’t escape your own very special Heritage!