National Rail - Let’s Get Back on Track

Campaign Summary

Even before the COVID19 crisis, Rail travel was undervalued. More often maligned than celebrated, disparate rail networks competed with the ease of travelling by car, or the speed of regional air flight, for each journey, against a backdrop of complaint about delays, prices and comfort. Then the arrival of the coronavirus in the UK created 18 months of fear about any public transport, with £100m of government adspend urging us to avoid it where possible.

So, in August 2021, when restrictions were lifted, the Rail Delivery Group knew it would take more than some free hand sanitiser on the platform to coax passengers back into their carriages.

It would take a highly visible campaign, uniting all the networks for the first time in decades, to appeal to the Nation’s happiest memories of rail journeys and to promise to connect them to those they had been missing so long. It would take a focus on what mattered most to different types of rail user to find moments to prompt a new journey. It would take personal stories of reunions and releases, with new ways to join in and it would take a relentless drive to convert online ticket sales as soon as the urge had been created. And to do that we would need to create a campaign vehicle that all 24 train operators could get behind.

So that’s what we did.

In doing so, we created one of 2021’s best loved campaigns, put rail travel at the heart of Britain’s return to real life and created a new model for rail communications for the future.

​Winner of The Independent Agency Awards 2022, Best B2C Campaign​