Greatest Gathering - 1st to 3rd August 2025

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From the Community Rail Network as part of Railway 200

The Greatest Gathering (Friday 1 – Sunday 3 August 2025)

Alstom’s Derby Litchurch Lane Works to host the largest temporary gathering of rolling stock and railway-related items in a generation

[grahame]

https://www.alstom.com/greatest-gathering

As part of this year’s Railway 200 celebrations, Alstom’s historic Derby Litchurch Lane Works will be front and centre, as it hosts the largest temporary gathering of trains and rail-related exhibits in a generation – The Greatest Gathering – between Friday 1 and Sunday 3 August.

After yesterday’s fantastic announcement regarding The Greatest Gathering happening at our Derby site in August, our ticketing provider’s site struggled to cope with unprecedented demand from around the world.

Even with a queuing system in place from mid-morning, this was not enough – and it will take time to secure additional capacity.

With that in mind, we have made the decision to suspend ticket sales until we are confident that our provider’s servers can handle the expected web traffic.

Rest assured, there are still thousands of tickets available across the three days and those who have already received a booking confirmation will receive their e-tickets in due course.

Details of when tickets will return to sale will be promoted on this website and on our social media channels.

[GBM]

https://www.alstom.com/greatest-gathering

As part of this year’s Railway 200 celebrations, Alstom’s historic Derby Litchurch Lane Works will be front and centre, as it hosts the largest temporary gathering of trains and rail-related exhibits in a generation – The Greatest Gathering – between Friday 1 and Sunday 3 August.

After yesterday’s fantastic announcement regarding The Greatest Gathering happening at our Derby site in August, our ticketing provider’s site struggled to cope with unprecedented demand from around the world.

Even with a queuing system in place from mid-morning, this was not enough – and it will take time to secure additional capacity.

With that in mind, we have made the decision to suspend ticket sales until we are confident that our provider’s servers can handle the expected web traffic.

Rest assured, there are still thousands of tickets available across the three days and those who have already received a booking confirmation will receive their e-tickets in due course.

Details of when tickets will return to sale will be promoted on this website and on our social media channels.

Should have gone to wellhouse for a reliable build and service! 

[grahame]

Should have gone to wellhouse for a reliable build and service! 

Funnily enough ... when we hear people tell us about great online experiences with some very big organisations, they often turn out to be ones we have trained.  It's amazing how much we got around.     

When we appeared on Four in a Bed, our contestant care person (the person assigned by the production company to help the twits who have signed up to warned us to expect a huge spike when they broadcast our show. Took a look / listened to what we did and said "I don't think you'll have any problems".  We didn't, though traffic was up that day by around 250 times.

I can't recall us training any of the companies who's booking engines have fallen over like in this example

[grahame]

Alstom has confirmed that tickets for The Greatest Gathering are set set to go back on sale following issues with the Mortons Media ticketing website last week.

Tickets originally went on sale on Friday last week, but sales were suspended a matter of hours later after many users received ‘Bad Gateway’ errors when trying to access the Mortons Media website.

Plenty of tickets remain available and will go back on sale tomorrow (5th February) at 9am

Based on last weeks demand, tickets wont be around for long and the new ticket website is being hosted by See Tickets, who are based in Nottingham.

[PrestburyRoad]

I've just booked a ticket successfully (for the Friday).  The booking office site actually opened a few minutes after 09:00 - I thought to myself it was gently emulating a train that keeps closely to the timetable albeit not exactly, and matching my mental expectation of keeping within 5 minutes of schedule.

Credit to the organisers for finding a new ticket provider that works.

[ChrisB]

90mins in, and tickets are still generally available.

So demand isn't *that* great.