TransPennine Express

TransPennine Express (TPE) operates intercity and regional passenger services across Northern England and Scotland, carrying over 27 million passengers annually. As one of Britain’s fastest-growing train operators, TPE needed a modern, scalable digital platform to streamline their ticket sales and customer service, while meeting ambitious go-live deadlines.

The challenge

1. Tender to replace WebTIS and app

TPE’s existing website Ticket Issuing System (WebTIS) and mobile app lacked key digital features, including sTickets and Digital Railcards. TPE issued a competitive tender looking for a new WebTIS and app provider.

2. Tight timelines

TPE’s project timescales in the tender were ambitious, with its 8-9 month timeframe being notably faster than typical TIS supplier changes. This would require close coordination with the previous supplier and careful prioritisation of scope.

3. Feature parity and enhancement

TPE’s tender required like-for-like functionality with their current TIS. This included features such as standalone bike and seat reservations and a variety of rovers, rangers and zonal fares. It left bidders the option of adding functionality.

4. Scalability & compliance

The winning solution had to handle TPE’s peak-time loads, and comply with strict data-security requirements, particularly when transferring customer data from the previous supplier.

Our solution

Each element of our solution was designed to directly address the challenges set out in TPE’s tender:

1. Winning tender bid

Ticketing platform: Our winning bid put forward our modern ticketing platform, designed to replace TPE’s existing WebTIS and app while providing a scalable foundation for new features.
Our responsive web & mobile apps: Offering smooth journey planning and fast, intuitive ticket purchases across devices.
Customer Service User Interface (CSUI): Providing a unified dashboard for TPE’s customer service agents to administer accounts, with role-based access.

2. Phased delivery approach

MVP (Minimum Viable Product): We broke down TPE’s requirements into an list of initial MVP functionality which we could deliver soonest, thus meeting their timescales.
Phase 2: Separately, we produced a list of exciting new features which we would deliver in the future.
Upscaled team: We took this new challenge as an opportunity to grow the team.

3. Bringing new features

Standalone bike and seat reservations: We developed this as an MVP item to make sure we matched TPE’s current functionality on day 1.
Ranger, rover and zonal fares: We added multiple new options for these fares as part of our MVP offering.
sTickets and digital changeovers: Our winning bid included these features which we had already developed, allowing them to go live on day 1.

4. Flexibility & smooth transfer

Load-scaling: We scale our systems dynamically based on load, allowing us to maintain a great user experience even during high-demand periods such as sales.
Customer ticket & data transfer: We successfully transferred 20,000 eTickets from TPE’s old platform to our new app, allowing customers to have a seamless experience despite the change of supplier. Customer accounts were also transferred whilst adhering to GDPR requirements.

Implementation Process

Discovery & design

Months 1-3

Requirements mapped with TPE stakeholders; UX prototypes; integration with new Journey Planning provider

Months 1-3

MVP feature development

Months 4-6

Core ticketing portal feature development; CSUI integration

Months 4-6

Preparation for go-live

Months 6-7

Create mobile builds; accreditation of new features

Months 6-7

Testing & training

Months 8-9

End-to-end QA; load testing; ‘train the trainer’ training sessions

Months 8-9

Launch & monitoring

Month 9 & beyond

Production launch overnight followed by 24/7 monitoring and dynamic scaling

Month 9 & beyond

How we delivered it

Agile collaboration

Regular meetings kept TPE informed at every step.

Site migration

We executed an overnight cutover from the old site, having previously imported existing customer data, including 20,000 live eTickets as well as smartcard and voucher data. The migration went successfully with only a short period of planned downtime.

Training

We delivered ‘train the trainer’ sessions to help get TPE’s customer service agents familiar with the CSUI before go-live.

Results & impact

New features live for TPE, such as sTickets for season tickets and digital changeovers.
Quicker purchases, with 80% of app users buying tickets in under 80 seconds.
4.6 star average review score on the App Store.
99.99% availability, meeting our SLA even during peak demand periods such as the Great British Rail Sale.

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