We have been speaking to our website hosts that have looked in to the issue of the site throwing up 504 errors during the Flying Scotsman visit.

We use a specialist hosting service that is designed to stop website outages happening at peak times and have narrowed the issue down to our chat system that our subscribers use to communicate on our website.

As more people log in to chat the site slows down and eventually give us the 504 error.

On Monday we will be temporarily disabling the chat program just for the hour run up to the Flying Scotsman’s return and will re-enable it after it’s passed.

We’re very sorry for the outage on Thursday but we’re not used to 10,000 people visiting the site within an hour.

Hopefully disabling the chat program temporarily, will allow the site to run without interruption and everyone will get to see the Flying Scotsman return.

If this solves the issue, we will be disabling chat for all future large events. Chat will remain active for the regular steam events though.