Did British Rail ever have a website?

[thenorthern]

Looking at old website I was wondering did British Rail ever have a website before it was privatised?

The earliest one I have found for a rail company is GNER, Central Trains and Virgin Trains all from from 1998 as well as Railtrack from 1997 but I can't find anything for British Rail.

 

[najaB]

I'd be surprised if they had anything other than a very rudimentary site as privatisation had already started before the web really took off.

 

[noddingdonkey]

I suspect not - privatisation had more or less happened by the time people started to have access to the net. Although some of the business units that hadn't yet been sold off had a website, such as various Regional Railways areas.

 

[yorkie]

Privatisation occurred around 1994-1997.

In 1994 hardly any websites existed, and there were virtually no home web users.

So I think you can safely say the answer is no.

 

[starrymarkb]

BBC didn't get online until 1996 so it's unlikely

First home browsers were a bit crap TBH didn't support fonts, tables or anything beyond a page of text.

 

[crehld]

BRB residuary (what was left of BR)l after privatisation) had a basic website until last year... Does that count?

 

[RichmondCommu]

Looking at old website I was wondering did British Rail ever have a website before it was privatised?

The earliest one I have found for a rail company is GNER, Central Trains and Virgin Trains all from from 1998 as well as Railtrack from 1997 but I can't find anything for British Rail.

I think you're showing your age here

 

[yorkie]

I think you're showing your age here

Not being able to recall the early days of the web doesn't really indicate anyone's age, as older people are much less likely to have been online in the early days (many still arent!) and our youngest members weren't born until the 2000s!

 

[thenorthern]

When did on-line booking start? I remember using in in 2000ish for Virgin Trains for the first time.

 

[RichmondCommu]

Not being able to recall the early days of the web doesn't really indicate anyone's age, as older people are much less likely to have been online in the early days (many still arent!) and our youngest members weren't born until the 2000s!

That's a fair point!

 

[W-on-Sea]

The earliest (very incomplete) capture of the Trainline - which I think was the first train ticket-selling website dates from May 1999. (If my memory serves me right, the first time I bought tickets online would have be sometime between 1999 and 2001)
https://web.archive.org/web/19990508065155/http://www.thetrainline.com/trainline.html

The first widely available browser, Mosiac, was released in 1993, but there really was only limited public access to the internet, outside of universities and other research centres, until maybe 1997 or 98.

British Rail had gone by then....

 

[Abpj17]

I started uni in 1996. GUI browsers (ok, just Netscape) were around then as was an often badly designed set of websites. Text browsers like Lynx were around too.

 

[thenorthern]

I was first on-line in 1996, at the time I was the first person in the village to be on-line which was something then.

When and where was the last train to be run by British Rail?

 

[RichmondCommu]

I was first on-line in 1996, at the time I was the first person in the village to be on-line which was something then.

When and where was the last train to be run by British Rail?

How big was / is the village?

I think the last train run by BR was a freight either to or from Dollands Moor.

 

[thenorthern]

How big was / is the village?

I think the population is about 2000 now and at the time I think the population was around 1700 at the time.

I remember in 1998 taking an internet CD into school for show and tell and most of my classmates had never seen a computer outside school and thought that it was really strange that computers could have CDs.

Yep the 2315 service from Dollands Moor to Wembley on 21 November 1997 was the last train run by British Rail.

 

[SWTH]

Really? I seem to remember CD's being commonplace by 1996 for computers - I know that in 1996-7 I lost countless weeks of my life playing the CD-based Command & Conquer: Red Alert (and the add-on Counterstrike/Aftermath levels) on my Pentium II-powered Packard Bell PC. CD's were certainly commonplace in the school IT department, which was part of a local comprehensive on the mid-Wales/Shropshire border.

 

[PaxVobiscum]

I think I see a spin off thread in the offing here.

Though I needed to have access to work computers at home before that, I bought my first computer in 1995 and had a 14.4 Kbps (!) modem for it a year later. In 1997 I sent digital photos of my newborn youngest to Canada within an hour or so of the birth. Not quite as easy a job as it would be now (they were frame grabs from a shoulder mount TV camera)!

Back on topic, relatively few websites then and most were awful.

 

[lyndhurst25]

Aparrently you could access British Rail timetables via Prestel, which was a bit like the internet before the internet was invented.

http://www.viewdata.org.uk/index.php?cat=15_Prestel

http://www.viewdata.org.uk/index.php?cat=20_British-nbsp~Rail&page=30_Screenshots

 

[thenorthern]

Really? I seem to remember CD's being commonplace by 1996 for computers - I know that in 1996-7 I lost countless weeks of my life playing the CD-based Command & Conquer: Red Alert (and the add-on Counterstrike/Aftermath levels) on my Pentium II-powered Packard Bell PC. CD's were certainly commonplace in the school IT department, which was part of a local comprehensive on the mid-Wales/Shropshire border.

We did have a RM in the class at the time and a BBC Micro although very few of the students knew how to use them because they didn't have computers outside school and there was no internet. I think it was about 1998 when more people started getting computers and it was about 2002 when everyone had one.

National Rail Enquiries went online in 1999/2000 as far as I can see Virgin Trains was 16 December 1997 and GNER was 3rd of October 1996 and TheTrainLine was 12th of March 1997.

What would a British Rail URL have been?

 

[ainsworth74]

Britishrail.co.uk would seem to be the oblivious choice! Though I wonder if the Sectors wouldn't have had their own? I can easily see Inter City and Network SouthEast wanting their own websites for example.

 

[43021HST]

I think the population is about 2000 now and at the time I think the population was around 1700 at the time.

I remember in 1998 taking an internet CD into school for show and tell and most of my classmates had never seen a computer outside school and thought that it was really strange that computers could have CDs.

Yep the 2315 service from Dollands Moor to Wembley on 21 November 1997 was the last train run by British Rail.

I wonder if there's any photos of the last BR train, a brief Google search came up with zilch.

Hmm British Rail website, I wonder if I could design one using the old 'had BR survived' scenario if my course brief will allow me to.

 

[sprinterguy]

I wonder if there's any photos of the last BR train, a brief Google search came up with zilch.

A scanned photo from the Railway Magazine was posted on this very forum back in 2010:

http://www.railforums.co.uk/showpost.php?p=427244&postcount=6

 

[yorkie]

Aparrently you could access British Rail timetables via Prestel, which was a bit like the internet before the internet was invented.

http://www.viewdata.org.uk/index.php?cat=15_Prestel

http://www.viewdata.org.uk/index.php?cat=20_British-nbsp~Rail&page=30_Screenshots

Pestel was developed during the "late 1970s" and launched in 1979.

What became the internet was developed during the 1960s and 1970s, with the term "internet" coming into use from 1974, although 1982 that the internet protocol (IP) was standardised and the concept of a world wide internet introduced.

So whether you can say Pestel was "invented" before the internet is perhaps a debatable point.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---

We did have a RM in the class at the time and a BBC Micro although very few of the students knew how to use them because they didn't have computers outside school and there was no internet.....

The internet did exist, but I think you mean your school had "no internet access".

I think it was about 1998 when more people started getting computers and it was about 2002 when everyone had one.

I'm not sure that everyone has one even today!

 

[furlong]

Looking at old website I was wondering did British Rail ever have a website before it was privatised?

A British Rail website was set up during the privatisation process (around 1995/6) with the tagline "UK Railways on the Net" and lives on today through Atos. It was very thin by today's standards.

> whois rail.co.uk
Relevant dates:
Registered on: before Aug-1996

By 1997 it looked like this.
Announcement dated 18th March 1996.
Timetables on the net 20th December 1996.

 

[steevp]

As a brief aside, BR was one of the early users of email - first using a mainframe based system that was available from terminals used for systems such as TOPS and the reservations system (the name escapes me). This was followed by a PC based system called Micromail. It used local servers as post offices and forwarded mail to offices, depots and some stations throughout the country. Text based, but you could send attachments and look up anyone on the system using the local copy of the directory. I worked in IT support before, during and after privatisation and it had been around a long while before then.

 

[furlong]

using a mainframe based system

The managers' electronic mailing option a.k.a. memo?

reservations system (the name escapes me)

The Central Reservations System a.k.a. CRS?

 

[steevp]

The managers' electronic mailing option a.k.a. memo?

Memo! that was it - thanks Furlong

 

[thenorthern]

Looking at some old timetables they are in .xls format, how times have changed.

 

[DaveNewcastle]

First home browsers were a bit crap TBH didn't support fonts, tables or anything beyond a page of text.

By 1995, existing users of Mosaic (which was able to render the vast majority of websites correctly with the 'font groups' which have persisted for 20 years thereafter) were joined by Netscape and Microsoft's 'Internet Explorer'.

It's absolutely true to say that commercial presence on the web was negligible, as was the corresponding consumer interest. But by then, the technology was leading the market, and there had been access to a vast range of documents via HTML (web sites) or FTP (databases, code, images, etc.) for almost a decade (and graphical interfaces to email clients before MS Windows appeared).

 

[jon0844]

I set up my website in August 1994 and I didn't have any sort of online ordering. It was basically a website with prices of the mobile phones I was selling, and a 'blog' that had news of what was going on in the industry.

When I attended events, I took a laptop, mobile + data card & digital camera (VGA, 0.3MP!) and uploaded news and reports within hours, compared to the vast majority of media that were using ordinary cameras with the intention of writing up news days later.

Oh how things have now changed when everyone is publishing within seconds, and rather a lot easier (and cheaper) than what I was doing. I didn't even have decent software to edit web pages (there was Microsoft Front Page at some point) so resorted to writing HTML in Notepad and debugging manually.