In sponsoring last year’s Hackathon we were able to see a number of our challenges in a new light, and through the projects of the participants, identify new solutions to take forward. HackPartners are energetic, ambitious and open minded in all that they do, traits that the industry needs in order to modernise UK rail.

It was interesting to see other sponsoring companies struggling with the same issues as SNCF at the HackTrain hackathons. The participants were very incredibly impressive, they work fast no matter where they are, in a train or in an office. The HackTrain hackathons are overall a good event for our brand communication and being seen as an open-minded company ready to look for solutions from outside the rail industry.

With the help of Hack Partners, we were able to gather innovators from around the world to build solutions to the problems faced in the transport sector. Ordinarily exploring such ideas would have taken many months and hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money, but with DfT Hacks, we were able to see prototypes after just 48 hours at a fraction of the cost. We’re now taking some of these ideas forward to not only improve our organisation, but also to improve the lives of transport users and deliver better value for the taxpayer.