I’m halfway through a family holiday interrailing in Europe, and still marvelling at being able to jump on a train on the Italian coast at lunchtime and get to an Austrian mountain spa town by evening.
It’s a fitting journey to mark the end of 2.5 years working with the team at Railway 200 on the fabulous bicentenary campaign that’s recently drawn to a close.
On the digital side, it included an interactive map, podcast series, online competitions, international translations, a Wikipedia page, a 3D train tour, history timeline and countdown clock amongst all the regular stuff of a digital campaign. There’s more about what got delivered in the case study over on my Pentri site.
Not blowing the budget on the initial build, and having a properly agile, user-centred way of working meant we could implement creative solutions to problems and make the most of opportunities that came along (plus a little Easter Egg for my own amusement). Plus, I got to visit a train factory to test out the offline career quiz iPad kiosk app we built for the exhibition train.
For the last few years since leaving Helpful, I’ve mainly worked by myself but for Railway 200 I was lucky enough to assemble an Ocean’s Eleven-style team of specialists including Katie Humphries on accessibility and user research, Howard Gossington on content, Andy Mabbett on Wikipedia support, Bulletproof (now WorkNest) on cyber security and heritage railway expert Kevin Boorman to guide us with international research.
I also got to work with one of my favourite client contacts of the last 15 years on the Network Rail side – the excellent Martyn Pennell. A great client is clear, challenging, creative and pragmatic. Martyn delivered some incredibly innovative stuff himself, and got the best from our team in support. Likewise, the wider Railway 200 team I worked with including Emma Roberts, Alan Hyde, Nicole Tibby – plus the team at Adventurous Audio – were committed, creative and considerate, which makes such a difference.
I’ll miss Railway 200, but it’s reminded me how much I enjoy supporting a small team with digital in the broad sense – from accessibility to archival, internationalisation to pen testing, AI optimisation to design systems.
If you could use a reliable, senior pair of hands to lead the digital side of what you’re working on, I’d love to hear from you.