Did British Rail ever have a website?

[Busaholic]

I was persuaded to buy a Sinclair Spectrum in about 1986 but couldn't find anything to use it for! Advertised it in a shop window about six months later and got my money back. My computer skills (haha) have barely advanced since then while all around me...

 

[Tibbs]

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

I think it was a couple of years before that. I certainly remember getting tickets in the post that I'd ordered online in 1998 or 99 to get back home from University.

 

[DarloRich]

The earliest railway company website I can recall was GNER. You could do online bookings but i am unsure when that started or when it became a common purchasing route. I think Virgin (I only used their XC trains then) were an early adopted of web services.

I was at uni in 97 and bought paper tickets from the station or SU travel shop. Within a year that had changed to such an extent that the SU travel shop was transformed into essentially a gap year travel centre.

I can recall using internet message boards around that time (via one of the massive computer halls at uni) to discuss the mighty DFC but they were very simple affairs. IRC the first tickets you bought on line were posted to you. There didn’t seem to be collection facilities.

 

[thenorthern]

I can recall using internet message boards around that time (via one of the massive computer halls at uni) to discuss the mighty DFC but they were very simple affairs. IRC the first tickets you bought on line were posted to you. There didn’t seem to be collection facilities.

Yes they were posted and they were the bulky ones that were like airline tickets that were used until around 2009.

 

[ag51ruk]

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

There was a Prestel terminal in the public area of the travel centre at Kings Cross, where you could look up some train times and print them off on thermal paper. This would have been in the early 80s, I think

 

[Willr2094]

Its unlikely that British Rail ever had one because the time that the Internet was really starting was unluckily also around the time that British Rail was privatised, so setting up a website would have been a VERY low priority.

 

[AnonymousUser1]

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).

this

BR died just as the web was taking off ...