New Features
The relaunch of the Railway Herald website brought with it the ideal opportunity to revamp and upgrade specific parts of the site. The railtours pages are read and looked at by thousands of people a week and there was a desire within the editorial team to improve and enhance the service that the pages offered.

So, with this in mind, there are several redefined and new features within the section. We hope that these make the use of the Railtours section easier and more valuable to you. If there is something which you feel should be changed or included, that hasn't been, then please do drop us a line, using the Feedback page.

1. Clearer listings of excursions
It was felt that more could be done to improve the look of the forthcoming and past railtour listings, by altering the styling of the page, while ensuring that all the exisiting information was included. As a result, the operator column (previously on the right) has been removed. The operators now appear in (brackets) at the end of the routing.

2. Provide railtour listings for specific locos
Although many readers look at the online railtour listings for details of what excursions are operating where on specific dates, a number of people also use the lists to check when their favourite steam or diesel locomotive is out. Because our listings are ordered by operating date, the latter task is not the simpliest. With our new website however, the locomotive numbers on the main listings page, and those on the 'Mainline Locomotives' page have become clickable. Clicking on either of these links provide a page dedicated to the specified locomotive which purely lists the forthcoming charters for that engine; steam, diesel or electric!

3. Better organisation of the historic listings
Until the new website, all charters which had operated in the past automatically moved from the forthcoming to the historic list, but the latter was simply displayed as a long page. As time progressed, this was becoming unreadable for users. So with the new site, this has been split into years. Further consideration is being given to splitting into half years, although a decision is yet to be taken on this.

4. New Mainline Locomotives page
The final new addition to the railtours section is a page detailing all past, expected and current historic motive power on the national network. Each of these is clickable (see addition two) to provide details of forthcomming charters for that locomotive.

We hope the new features add interest and usability to the railtour sections.