Seeing firsthand 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.

Wanting to tap into the huge potential the national Coronation celebrations offered for promoting sustainable leisure travel, Southeast Communities Rail Partnership created a social media campaign to highlight the green credentials of train travel. Over the six-week campaign, the CRP calculated the environmental savings of travelling from London to 13 attractions with Royal connections on each of its nine lines, by train versus car. The series of social media posts garnered over 13,000 impressions on Twitter/X alone, with tags and mentions from train operators, destination organisations and local media leading to wider sharing and organic growth. In a wonderfully imaginative way, the ‘Coronation Connections’ project captured the spirit of the celebrations by harnessing the influence of our rail network and the relevance of community rail.

Gloucestershire CRP took a hyper-local approach to the marketing campaign for the Slimbridge Shuttle Bus. The CRP wanted to ensure the benefits of the shuttle service, both as a means of accessing the popular wetland centre and a general mode of accessible community transport between any of the stops along the route, reached all corners of the local community.

PR, social media and focused leaflet and poster distribution was conducted in collaboration with Slimbridge Wetland Centre to maximise the communications reach. Over the 3-month trial period, the campaign reached over half a million local residents, resulting in over 500 people using the shuttle service and it being rated as 4.9/5 in terms of overall satisfaction.