New Steam Railtours Website

http://www.onthemain.co.uk/


"On The Main is a brand new service, built to make the experience of finding a railtour thats right for you, easier than ever before.

What we’ve created is a system that has all the information you need, to find services that meet your criteria for the best possible travelling experience.

Our unique search functionality has the capability to take your preferences, and then display only matches that are right for you. This makes it easier than ever before to find railtours departing from stations near you.

Within On The Main, each railtour has its own, dedicated page, containing all the information you need to decided if the journey is right for you. We’ve endeavoured to provide the best information about railtours, ranging from pricing to timings, to make On The Main, as informative as possible.

If you have a specific destination in mind, then our dedicated pages will show you all the upcoming railtours.
Similarly, if you have an affinity for a particular locomotive, then simply visit the loco shed, to see what individual engines will be doing in the weeks and months to come.

At almost any point within On The Main, you are one click away from tour operators dedicated railtour pages from which you can find out more and even continue to make a booking. All you have to do, is click."

To call it uksteam with pretty pictures would be quite unfair there are some interesting functions like finding tours by loco or destination/origin for all tour operators. Like a search engine for steam charters it makes it much easier to find a train to go on rather than trawling through the huge list on the uksteam page or individual websites of tour companies.

Although I note the Disclaimer page says that information is sourced from the official websites of tour operators. No doubt there are people who will question the accuracy of the info shown.....

 

Good luck with this. The site looks pretty, but it's going to require quite a lot of dedication to keep it up to date as tours get cancelled, re-dated, routes and locos change etc.

 

Thumbs down from me I'm afraid..
I don't need a middle man to book me a ticket, and having travelled 4 million miles and stayed 1000+ nights in hotels this century I have an inbuilt distrust/avoidance of travel agents...

DIY for me
1. Look at uksteam
2. Look at company's website
3. Wait until as late/as certain as possible of success as possible before booking mainline steam and only with the promoter.

It may be good for a mass market (if its got budget to promote itself enough across the nation), but with it comes all the roller coasters of responsibility the tour promoters have today... Without boots on the ground to fix on the day.

If this venture is to make money, it won't last long.
Sorry to burst the bubble.

However, if they are willing to risk it all, and prepared to "ticket master style" bulk buy tickets and sell them at a discount, or act as a bucket shop for last minute sales, there maybe a market there for those willing to accept risk for savings...
But I don't see the promoters taking that up.

 

As an example of the problems ahead, one only has to look at the page for tomorrow's RTC tour to Bristol....

http://www.onthemain.co.uk/railtours/556/bath-and-bristol-christmas-markets

Text copied from the RTC website which quotes Tangmere as the loco, but furtther down it lists 44871 and 45407 as the locos (presumably based on what it said on ulsteam.info yesterday), but, in fact, it's only 44871.

Btw, the changing text on the home page before "railtours, all in one place" doesn't appear to work properly on IE9 - it just results in a jumble of overlapping letters. Not overly keen on the out of focus background either.

 

I think you've misunderstood the site. It allows you to find tours based on starting station, destination, loco and date, then links you to the relevant page on the tour company site. They do not sell tickets themselves so are not a "middle-man", more of a "search engine". Revenue seems to be solely through advertising.

As Al says it would be interesting to know who is behind such a site though.

 

The creator behind it is the webmaster for Icons of steam/LSL

 

Still not buying it..

Typed in carshalton as the station, entered December as the month... Came back with nothing.
As an enthusiast I am Not surprised really as I doubt mainline steam has ever stopped there.
As bob the builder looking to impress his dad for Christmas, he won't find much value.

And therein lies the problem, I doubt I'd be the only pea in the half empty tin to try that, but such a search engine sets an expectation of "mass results" as that's what the public are used to...
The whole ethos of a search engine is to connect people with information.
If you get constant none or zero they lose interest and fade away.
If you don't have much information to share, the best thing is to make sure you point people in the right direction.

Now if your aiming at the average user on here.. Well guess what they like you and I will know what runs, where it runs, when it runs and the risks involved.. So won't use it anyway.

The website needs to offer something others don't, but it has to be a useful something, not something that most people don't need, or something it cannot deliver.

Now based on the post above, if this was LSLs showcase and they promoted there own tours... Guess what... It has something others don't...lsl's trips... But it doesn't need the station search to list them, unless lsl was taking on nationwide daily steam.

Think of it like window shopping, this site is a shop window.. Doesn't matter if it has a nice facade, if the display is empty, I'm not going in.

So my advice for stocking your shelves..
1. Take away the typing from the user so Remove the station search text box. (Even if they type st pancras and there is a tour, they will spell it wrong).
2. have a filter (checkbox, or multi select list) that only lists stations that actually have tours stopping there.
3. Have a 2nd level dependant filter, restrict it to which months they stop there..
4. list the tours.

 

I really like it. I guess it isn't something enthusiasts will deem wholly necessary. But for the general public looking for a hub of information that's simple to navigate with some pretty pictures, I think it's spot on.

 

The website is aimed more the general public rather than the hardened enthusiast and as with everything else it will improve and develop.

 

Ditto IE8. However, that's just a teething problem, and suggests they haven't tested with as wide a set of browsers as they might have done. There are other odd things about the styles and layout, but if the operator is paying attention to details (and to constructive feed-back from folks like us), they'll get fixed.

Whether the site reaches its target audience, and whether they find it useful, remains to be seen. How do non-specialist, potential railtour passengers go about finding out what's on? If they're Internet savvy, my guess is that they google "steam train to bath" or "steam tour july", etc.

That first search turns up the RTC and Steam Dreams sites, but not OnTheMain (at least, not on the first page). However, it does turn up this site that I've not come across before: http://www.beholder.co.uk/steam/

 

I quite like the site, for me uksteaminfo does what I need, but I think to have an all in one site if you are a casual enthusiast or something i think this site would help. I am not speaking on behalf of the site creator of Icons of steam site they are wholly independent from each other.
It will be interesting to see how the site takes off in terms of general public usage, don’t forget when you create a website if you want it categorised in a Google search this takes time. Once this is completed I will be interested to see if it comes up when you search something generic like steam train tour or such like.

 

It's quite well put together. I couldn't find the search by station option and I think I will stick with uk steam but I'm sure it will find an audience