National Rail Enquiries to get under-the-hood makeover

The National Rail Enquiries website, which provides passengers with up-to-the-minute information on train services, is set to deploy a new content management system intended to help it weather the onslaught of enquiries that results from British winters.

Train Information Services Ltd, which is owned by the train operating companies, is looking for a hosted content management system that can deal with 18 million visitors per month – as well as spikes in demand that result from disruptions such as snow or engineering works.

The new service is expected to be operational by March 2013 and will replace a system that has experienced its fair share of disruption.

The National Rail website was unable to cope with demand in both 2009 and 2010 when heavy snowfall caused chaos on the railways and set commuters scrambling online for travel information.

The new content management system must be compatible with the existing front-end design and be able to work with existing journey planning services and live train information systems.

While the system is expected to be hosted by the service provider, TIS will retain control over which data centre will be used to host the system.

According to the tender document, TIS will demand high availability of the website along with fast page response times.

The current nationalrail.co.uk site has used hosting services from Detica and Savvis in recent months according to data from website monitoring service Netcraft. At present, the site's average length of time between system reboots – which it defines as uptime – is 12 days.

The initial contract for the content management system will last for three years, with potential to be extended by a further four years.