Atoll Blog article uploaded 29th July 2025 discussed the (then) forthcoming ‘The Greatest Gathering’ of rail aficionados happening in Derby between 01-03 August 2025; the Passenger Rail Bicentennial happening in Stockton & Darlington in September 2025; and the outline of the writer’s recent consultancy work for Network Rail, calling for a sustainable, creative reset for 21st century rail with it’s shifting communities of use, interest, place or profession: That (perhaps unsurprisingly unadopted) call, asked for consideration for an urgent new direction for the Creative Culture of our railways, to be sustainably engaged through a test pilot of new new participatory collaborations and ‘cultural commoning’.

Waiting on a New Soul Train

This Friday I am due to attend a new national rail festival being dubbed “the Glastonbury of railways”. Personally, I imagined it would be more like a rail-mad comic-con convention than a music festival (with train-obsessed superhero fancy dress on show), but let’s see how it goes. Here, over a three day long weekend, more than 40,000 train enthusiasts will be setting out on a personal pilgrimage to Derby for something being called ‘The Greatest Gathering’ at train manufacturer Alstom based there. It will feature says Alstom: “more than 100 iconic vehicles from the past, present and future of the railways, and marks the first time in almost 50 years that the train factory has been open to the general public”.

All linked to a year-long national celebration called ‘Railway 200’, this mass migration coincides with the 200th anniversary year of the world’s first passenger train service that began with great hurrah on the inaugural Stockton and Darlington Railway line in September 1825. Expect a plethora of similar rail passenger bicentennials all happening soon after in rapid series – starting with the one marking the 200th anniversary in 2029 of George Stephenson first testing of his iconic ‘Rocket’ in the Rainhill Speed Trails on the Whiston incline near St Helens. Catching up fast on the rails, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (arguably some claim as the first true commercial passenger railway), which these test-bed trials were geared towards, was to launch just a year later.

Previously, a collective noun of ‘anoraks’ might be used dismissively to describe any mass gathering of eccentric trainspotter types. But this can be no more, with a slay youth and their social media champions like Francis Bourgeois (the exotic YouTube pseudonym of one Magnus Nicholson). Single-handedly, he has drastically reduced the average age plus levelled-out the gender mix and self-identity of the previous usual suspects of rail aficionados. A similarly creative descriptive noun is also needed for his new train of young acolytes today – and certainly one far more eloquent than the oily rag vernacular of ‘gricers’ or ‘ferroequinologists’ (reportedly of Latin origin and meaning “one who studies iron horses”), more reminiscent of the flat cap, ‘Wheeltappers & Shunters Social Club’ era of nationalised British Rail.

More of a road cyclist activist than active gricer, the BBC Radio 2 Jeremy Vine Show is also due at The Greatest Gathering, where Vine will be broadcasting live. His playlist will also feature one of the five wonderful new songs commissioned as part of an annual Radio 2 programme called ‘21st Century Folk’ – as being showcased by Mark Radcliffe on The Folk Show. This year’s songwriters theme is unsurprisingly inspired by our railways and their 200 year birthday year. The brief was for each to write and perform a new song, inspired by an individual indelibly linked to the railway in one way or the other. Featuring with Jeremy Vine on the day is reportedly The Coral front man and singer-songwriter Bill Ryder-Jones, (Climbing The Shap Again). But the other commissioned artists and their songs include:  Findlay Napier, (Firecracker); Chris While & Julie Matthews, (The Waiting); Kate Rusby, (Light Beyond The Lines); and Richard Thompson, (Siggy’s Song).

Such a rail-themed gathering and showcase of folk music instantly reminded me of archive blues and gospel footage of 61 years ago on 7th May 1964 in Whalley Range. On that day, a trainload of 200 music fans had been disembarked as passengers onto the rainy disused, former railway station at Wilbraham Road. Overhead, a huge platform sign was hung, displaying the words of ‘Chorltonville’ – a fictitious new cultural destination, styled on a southern U.S railroad station. The predominantly young crowd quickly took their seats along one abandoned platform for an alfresco-impromptu live shown the other, and all simultaneously recorded for Granada TV. Titled the ‘Blues and Gospel Train’, the televised concert featured black American music legends like Muddy Waters and Sister Rosetta Tharpe and quickly gained cult status as a TV innovator.

But I digress. The real reason for my own interest in attending The Greatest Gathering (apart from my friend Mark being the current Chair of the ‘Mid Cheshire Community Rail Partnership’ based in Knutsford and inviting me along to accompany him and his friend Roger the rail buff and brother-in-law Dave the ex-trainspotter) is that during 2024, I had spent an awful lot of time working with Design Council to try to develop an outline proof of concept for Network Rail that looked to engage the true social value and cultural benefit of rail. Out of this exploration, came a proposal for a series of interconnected ‘Creative Culture’ principles – linked to a separate but complimentary ‘Culture Tracks’ commissioning programme of limited pilots.

Sadly, all of this blue-sky-thinking has since petered-out and come to nothing. But in fairness to the commissioners though, the timing was perhaps not ideal – as whilst the brief was understandable given that a Railway 200, always had to be set in 2025 and was the obvious catalyst, the (then) forthcoming General Election (with an unsure political outcome of a future Great British Railways transition and Levelling-Up initiatives like ‘Network North’) was always going to be tricky obstacles to navigate around. In hindsight, any adoption of an ambitious cultural strategy for rail was going to be difficult considering a conservative industry as client, and coming at a time where an imminent Government transition of it’s national rail remained unknown and worries over an inflationary economy was yet to be quelled.

But the manifesto of this new Creative Culture had very much hoped to culturally embrace other arts and creative practices holistically. In doing this, a series of inter-connected principles were to be adopted loosely to seek to also compliment Network Rails own ambition for better wayfinding through its current custodianship of myriad collections of railway-associated art, design and cultural ephemera painstakingly collated by a rail industry over two centuries of existence.

Addressing this eclectic national collection, the principles aspired to increasingly engage a wider range of creative industry and artisan craft, with residencies set up to better explore the potential for a new emerging cultural vision for our 21st century railway future. It also proposed a creative practice-led approach that looked to better engage the wider, growing and diversifying ‘communities of rail’ (be these communities of rail use, interest, place and/or profession).

By way of some background context, in again anticipating the forthcoming Stockton and Darlington Railway bicentenial, Peter, Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill, and chair of both Railway 200 and Network Rail, had talked of a much-needed reset to the public’s long relationship with rail. As such, and with the related national festival of Railway 200 during 2025 looking to engage that reset, the proposed Creative Culture principles sought to help carry that cultural legacy onwards, towards the next 200-years.

Similar calls for wider rail innovation and change, had also been backed-up in the February 2024 George Bradshaw address, where trade body Rail Partners linked the launch of a new ‘Manifesto for Rail’ with it’s pre-election calls for main parties to  get on with reform. These were (and remain) sentiments also backed by other associated bodies such as the Campaign for Better Transport and Rail Reform Group.

So it was, albeit as a small but hopefully important part of this reboot, a proposed Creative Culture adoption was hoped to become both a fluid and innovative approach within a more creative industry reform. It aspired to look forward positively, whilst being tempered by the realities of needing more joined-up-thinking and a sustainable need-for-change. It was felt that such change addressed could also naturally include (but not exclusively) key cross-cutting issues around climate change and the growing challenges to more creatively engaging cultural inclusion, social value and well-being.

Sitting alongside these core idea was also the prototype of a limited edition of initial test pilots of creative commissioning to help articulate the emerging new core principles. Part seed and part crowd-funded, these deliberately creative experiments looked to explore the wider creative and cultural benefits and community interface of our changing future sustainable railway networks – whilst assisting and empowering the growing Community Rail Networks. This series of interconnected fringe pilots were proposed of course to link to a new creative mindset being developed simultaneously – all to increase access to ideas around cultural democracy, the socially engaged and participatory collaboration called ‘cultural commoning’ proposed to help communities and new generations embrace a shared sense of ‘civic reimagining’.

In exploring ever-more imaginative engagement and education of young people, the same creative principles also proposed to look to informally pilot the adding back of the missing ‘A’ of ‘Arts’ into the currently more conservative ‘Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths’ (STEM) curriculum – to explore and evaluate the added social value of using its more creative cousin called ‘STEAM’. 

Applying informal Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) considerations, organisations like Network Rail are naturally already well-informed by strategy focussing on Environmental Sustainability Strategy and Social Value Framework. But the continued priority of ‘Connecting Communities with the Railways’ remit, was also seen as an important artistic theme help a broader consideration of what a future ‘rail community’ might be find it’s own independent cultural identity through.

A little naive and overly ambitious perhaps, but this new philosophy of reimagining a new Creative Culture was also hoped to ultimately align with the wider cultural priorities of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals too, (which has already confirmed that culture and creativity should contribute to all of its goals transversally). This in turn, also deliberately linked to Design Council’s own current Design for Planet movement that recognises the critical role creativity can play in shaping our world.

Of course, any attempted drawing-together of wider communities of rail to initiate and grow creative activity and practices through participative and collaborative approaches is not a new idea. Indeed, the myriad partnerships of Community Rail Network spread around the country have been attempting this successfully for years linked to their own individual programmes. However, there is an inevitable divide and rule fragmentation found here, where a lack of more joined-up thinking and creative collaborations from a ‘curatorial’ vision, often impedes artistic quality and the risk-taking of true innovation.

What the new Creative Culture principles and linked Culture Tracks pilot strands offered potentially to Network Rail’s were the innovative beginnings at least of a more targeted creative direction with mechanisms for funding, including the facilitated crowd sourcing of it, all geared towards it’s community rail networks. In the short term of course, this new direction was meant to lead itself initially towards delivering creative outputs against the Railway 200 bicentennial agendas. But after 2025, the broader ambition (once the principles, mapping and showcased pilots had all been been properly evaluated) was the longer term journey that aimed to map, test and refine that vision further, whilst looking to broker new and curatorial funding models to sustain itself without excessive subsidy.

Naturally disapointed at the lack of industry uptake in the Creative Culture and linked Culture Tracks, I am still hopeful that populist initiatives like the Glastonbury of Rail that is this ‘The Greatest Gathering’ rail fest, as well as the ‘21st Century Folk’ themed song commissions, will all help to raise the arts & cultural bar for our shifting communities of rail. In this hope, I am again reminded of our ‘Chorltonville’ singer-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who in a much earlier 1930’s classic song to her mentioned ‘Blues & Gospel Train’ performances, called ‘This Train’, sang of hope that: “This train has left the station and this train takes on every nation”.

All aboard and Amen to that Sister.