Clients

Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway

This heritage steam railway was in a period of change. Having identified a need to update systems and streamline operations to help achieve their goal of extending the line, they looked to technology to help keep the past up to date.

It was April 2009 when we were asked to present a solution to the management team at the GWR in Toddington. They had already done a fair amount of research on our system by talking to one of the other railways and had decided in principal that it was the kind of thing they needed.

The first step was to drill down into the current manual system used for taking Santa Special bookings, detailing any particular needs and ensuring that the new system was geared accordingly. Much of the process was similar to other railways but one element did require some attention.

They needed each running of the Santa Special to only carry a maximum of 200 passengers of which no more than 80 could be children. This requirement was to ensure that every child had adequate time with Santa during their visit and that more than 80 would cause problems due to the limited time available. The booking system was therefore modified to only continue selling tickets for each service while the number of children was less than 80 AND the total number of passengers was less than 200. This is a departure from the standard ‘maximum total capacity’ offering.

Our designers also came up with ideas for the railway’s new thermal ticket stock and ticket wallets to enable advance booked tickets to be posted to customers prior to their visit. The first challenge was to clean up the GWR logo for which there was no existing high quality digital image. Our in-house team produced an updated version for use online and on the new printed materials.

The final step was to liaise with the railway’s webmaster and designer of the brand new website onto which the booking system had to be bolted. He had used CSS to create a new layout for their site which needed to be replicated on the booking system. We took his code and applied it to our code to produce a seamless link between the information-based GWR site and our ticket purchasing modules.

Visit http://www.gwsr.com