We are welcoming Matthew Somerville with his talk: "The journey of a fast accessible web app: lessons from 25 years of traintimes.org.uk" at FFConf 2026.

We wanted to also thank Matthew for taking the time to answer our questions so we can all get to know him a little bit more before Friday 13th November.

About Matthew and his talk

• Title: The journey of a fast accessible web app: lessons from 25 years of traintimes.org.uk
• About the talk: I've been running traintimes.org.uk since 2001, providing live departure boards and journey planning faster than the official site, and in this talk I will show you why and how, and why you should care?
• Matthew's origin story: My mum brought home a BBC B from her job as a teacher at an adult further education college, along with some Acornsoft games and Usborne books. PLOT 85, 100, 100 and *REPTON was all it took.

The warm up questions

What was the first thing you made the BBC B do that felt like magic?

I remember the ring-bound User Guide, though not what in particular I did with it. Perhaps outputting something that looked like Teletext? :) Re-reading it now, it is very nicely written, e.g.

"When you have a clear picture, do by all means press every button in sight on the computer – you can't do it any harm at all. Usually it just keeps on saying Mistake whenever you press the large key marked RETURN. Mistake just means that the computer does not understand your commands. Its fault – not yours!"

Aww.

Which Usborne computer book would you hand to a curious ten-year-old today?

I've just discovered Usborne have actually put all their 80s computer books online.

I'm not saying any of those would be as useful today to a curious 10 year old (though give them a BBC B emulator as well and who knows...), but in a more modern vein I did enjoy Matt Round's DOCTYPE magazine that brought back the type-in program, but for HTML web apps :)

About the work and the talk

What made you want to build your own train times site back in 2001?

From the BBC B, I progressed to an Acorn A5000 which saw me through school and college, then a RiscStation at university. This well loved but niche system, with web browsers that might be less advanced, was more likely to have trouble with badly designed (eg "IE only") websites, which could be annoying. This spurred an interest in accessibility and usability, making websites available to all.

I frequented newsgroups (the Discord of the 90s), where National Rail's live departure board rubbishness was being discussed, and as a frequent train traveller myself, I decided to use my web/programming skills to let me transform the information from a website into a more usable form.

What have you heard from people who rely on the site?

It's lovely to get feedback from people who find it helpful, even if I only made it for my own use ;-) For example:

• "I'm totally blind and use JAWS screenreader on my desktop and have struggled for ages with the minefield that is the train line!...then I found your [site] and I bless the day that I did."
• "I'm totally blind and use a screen reader to access the internet. traintimes.org.uk is my go to for looking up train times because it is far and away the most accessible system I've found."
• "Thank you! The site is brilliant. I've been stuck having to phone the rail enquiries line for years and they're rather hit and miss (more miss)."

Also some feedback about its performance:

• "Added @dracos's traintimes site to my phone home screen – it is faster than any of my apps"
• "it's so lightweight now, it's quicker to use than actually looking at the announcement boards in a larger station."
• "The iCal link on the traintimes.org.uk search results page is amazing as it allows me to add journey plans right into my calendar. It saves a huge amount of time for me."

What's one thing about building for the web that hasn't changed since 2001?

At its core, when I think about it, much of what I do today is much the same as it was in 2001; one of the great strengths of the web is its backwards compatibility. Of course there have been great advances in all of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in that time, but fundamentally, writing a web site can still be approached and implemented in the same way: semantic, accessible HTML base, responsive CSS design, and progressively enhanced JavaScript, all in as small a package as possible.

Computers and other devices have got magnitudes quicker in the past 25 years, and yet many websites have somehow got slower in the same time...

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Find out more about Matthew online at dracos.co.uk and see the site itself at traintimes.org.uk.

Join us in November to see Matthew's talk: 2026.ffconf.org