Railway 200 marked 200 years of train travel in Britain – and became the world’s largest rail celebration, reaching six million people across 180 countries. An integral element of the campaign was a website I designed, built and supported from early 2024 through to the campaign’s conclusion in 2026, bringing in Pentri associate colleagues to support me with content design, research, accessibility and usability testing.
When I joined the project, the brief was relatively open and the campaign was still in development. I worked with the core team and stakeholders to create a website proposition document that shaped the launch website, broadly scoping priorities, defining audience needs and separating immediate requirements from future phases. It gave us a shared language to work with while the team and campaign got up to speed. Throughout the project we had weekly digital team check-in calls with Railway 200’s fantastic in-house digital manager, as well as shared Figma and Trello boards to collaborate and manage feedback smoothly.
The full site launched in April 2024 with a set of priority features: campaign background, a brand toolkit, email sign-up integration, and a historical timeline of railway development – the first comprehensive overview of its kind, produced in collaboration with the National Railway Museum. From there it grew with the campaign in phases:
- a community events map with moderated submissions
- the Great Rail Tales podcast of railway voices, produced by Adventurous Audio
- schools materials and competitions
- Welsh and multilingual translation
- charity partnership
- a dedicated section for the touring exhibition train Inspiration – including an arrivals board display showing its stops around the country
- a station-style countdown clock ticking down to the anniversary weekend
One of my most satisfying contributions was the ‘Your role on the railway’ careers quiz, which I built to work offline on tablet kiosks aboard Inspiration, helping thousands of visitors – many of them schoolchildren – explore rail career pathways in an engaging, interactive way.
Accessibility was a thread throughout: we tested with disabled users alongside automated tooling and put effort into making the events map navigable for screen reader and keyboard users. My team proactively addressed content gaps and opportunities including a guide to training and qualifications in rail designed to serve organic search traffic, and richer storytelling around the charity partnership to encourage participation in fundraising.
Performance, security and privacy were taken seriously from the start. Part of the Pentri pitch was our track record running high-traffic sites through unpredictable demand peaks, including the Coronation and Platinum Jubilee campaigns. The Railway 200 WordPress platform was built to handle sudden traffic spikes, independently security tested with a clean bill of health, and consistently achieved strong Google PageSpeed scores, boosting organic SEO. We used cookieless analytics throughout to minimise privacy overhead. At the campaign’s close, I worked with the Railway 200 team, National Archives and Wikipedia to ensure the site could be comprehensively archived and that Railway 200’s Wikipedia article was complete and consistent with Wikipedia values.
By the numbers: 900,000 unique visitors, 2.2 million page views, 416,000 organic search clicks, visitors from 180 countries – alongside a VisitEngland Outstanding Contribution to Tourism Award for the wider campaign.
A great result for an anniversary that truly captured the national imagination – and my favourite iterative, user-centred, pragmatic way of working together with a client on a digital campaign.
Header photo and video montage footage: Network Rail/Railway 200, some material under CC-SA open license