About this site

This site started out as a bright idea inspired by the totally unexpected success of a site I created a few years ago: Motorway Services Info.

MSI (as it inevitably gets called) was originally simply a test-bed for creating CSS layout, but it's grown to become one of my most popular websites and is now the first result in Google for almost any search related to motorway services. So I started casting around for something else that I could apply the same princples to, and came up with the idea of doing much the same for railway stations.

The big difference is that, unlike motorway services, there are already plenty of sites out there which list every railway station – Network Rail, for example, as well as sites selling tickets and giving timetable information. So there didn't seem any point in just having a site listing facilities (although this site does include them) – instead, I decided to concentrate on the other things which have made MSI what it is: User comments and photographs. In particular, I want to create a comprehensive photo gallery that contains at least one photo of every British railway station currently in use.

That's a bit of a tall order, but fortunately I'm not the first to think about it. I'm indebted to Owen Dunn for letting me seed my database with his photos, and I've also taken advantage of the many contributors to Wikipedia who have provided descriptions and images of a selection of British railway stations.

Another thing I learned from writing MSI is that I'm not all that good at coming up with interesting and stylish designs, so for this site I've based the layout and visual appearance on a free CSS template from STUDIO7DESIGNS.

Planned Improvements

The site is still under construction at the moment (as are all sites, really), and there are some features which I want to add but haven't yet had time for. In particular, I want to add the following:

• Better ways of finding stations. At the moment, there are only two options: Browsing the alphabetical lists or searching by name. Regional lists and the ability to pick from a clickable map would be good, as well as the possibility of listing by operator.
• RSS feeds of the data. Since nearly everything on the site is the result of someone else's work, it seems unfair to keep it all to myself! I want to be able to make as much as possible of the content available for easy re-use by anyone else.
• Links to timetable and ticket information. This isn't primarily a travel site, but users are likely to want to travel to the locations it lists and it would be good to offer an easy way to get the information they need to do so.
• Site-specific station descriptions. At the moment, the "Description" page for each station is a simplified version of its Wikipedia entry. In the long run, I'd like to replace or complement that with content written specifically for this site – either by me or anyone else who feels like contributing. With over 2,500 stations currently in use in Britain it's going to be a very big task to complete, though!