The UK’s biggest outdoor rail event returns to Long Marston Rail Innovation Centre this week, with a record numbers of visitors registered to attend.

Rail Live is always one of the highlights of the year in the rail calendar. This year when visitors arrive, the first thing they’ll see stretched out along the perimeter fence which forms the main walkway to the registration area is the new Stratford’s Lost Railways exhibition, a partnership with the Stratford-upon-Avon charity Escape Arts. The exhibition explores through iconic historic and present-day photography how the railway in the local area has changed significantly over the last 70 years.

HydroFLEX, the UK's first heavy-rail hydrogen train developed by Porterbrook, will be on show again this year on the Innovation Platform, having reached a number of significant milestones since Rail Live 2023, including travelling at over 90mph on the mainline during testing.

In the Porterbrook marquee, we’re focusing on the excellent partnerships we have across the rail industry and with local communities. Visitors will be able to see the “Past Visions of the Future” exhibition, our collaboration with the National Railway Museum looking at the last 200 years of ideas for what the future of rail might have looked like. The exhibition is a “teaser” in the build up to the opening of the Porterbrook sponsored Railway Futures Gallery at the museum in York in 2026.

Visitors can test out Remote Conditioning Monitoring (RCM) technology themselves within the comfort of the marquee. The interactive display demonstrates our partnership with Instrumentel to pilot RCM technology with a number of operators over the last year.

We’re also displaying some of the innovative trains created by children in our partnership with Primary Engineer for the Rail Project, delivered to schools close to Long Marston over the last year, and we’re hosting a special event each day in the Engineering Marquee in which children from the project will be teamed up with leading representatives from across the railway to take on each other in a live engineering challenge on stage.

It looks set to be another excellent event, and we look forward to seeing representatives from across the rail industry there!