Gloucestershire CRP delivered a comprehensive communications campaign to celebrate the county's diverse cultural heritage and connect its Black history to the present day.

Local artist Rider Shafique was commissioned to create a new station exhibition. Using photographs and quotes, the artwork focuses on themes of identity and honouring the contributions of Caribbean migrants who worked for British Railways. The exhibition was installed at four key stations (Gloucester, Stroud, Stonehouse and Cam & Dursley), which collectively saw over 2.5 million entries and exits in 2022-23 (Office of Rail and Road's 'Estimates of Station Usage 2022-23' dataset).

The exhibition linked to Gloucestershire CRP’s previous collaboration with Black Ark Media on Gloucestershire’s first Black History Map. The map serves as a guide to discovering the diverse contributions of Black Britons to art, education, and culture in the local area, highlighting walking routes and active rail and sustainable travel experience radiating from Gloucestershire’s nine railway stations, leading to a series of significant Black History sites.

By leveraging partnerships, coordinating across media channels and creating compelling content, Gloucestershire CRP successfully raised awareness of important cultural and historical themes while promoting community engagement and sustainable travel. The campaign's integration of art, history and community involvement created a rich, engaging experience that resonated with local residents and media outlets, achieving its core objectives of celebrating diversity, fostering understanding and connecting Gloucestershire's past with its present.

Seeing first-hand how passionate community rail partnerships are about improving young people’s rail safety knowledge and instilling them with a culture of life-long, confident rail use, the Community Rail Education Network was keen to produce its own resources to distribute to young people, empowering them to continue rail safety conversations at home. Through funding from Community Rail Network, ScotRail and Freightliner, this became a reality.

Inspired by her Freightliner driver training where students learn through scenario-based situations, author Bessie Matthews chose a ‘pick a path’ style adventure when designing the book. 20,000 copies were initially printed and distributed to five national hubs – since then, over 90,000 books have been shared across rail industry, education, and youth engagement settings as far as Australia, Japan and America.

‘Arlo’s Adventures’ has received positive coverage across the UK and beyond, enabling community rail’s messages to reach a wider audience and communicating with young people in a creative way about how to navigate the rail network safely. The project continues to expand, with Bessie working alongside individual CRPs to produce personalised ‘Arlo’ content for stations, supporting Great Western Railway in creating a book for young people with additional needs, and starting preparations for an English/Welsh bilingual sequel.