At the PhocusWright Conference, taking place in Hollywood Florida on the 15th to 17th of November, SilverRail will be hosting a workshop highlighting some of the benefits of rail travel, and also giving an overview of some of the work that we have been doing in the space since we got started just over two years ago.

In the last couple of weeks, both Amtrak, the national US rail carrier, and ATOC, the collection of UK train operators, have announced that they have had record ridership, or are on course for record ridership, in this calendar year.

At SilverRail, we are continuing to make substantial progress towards our goal of connecting the world's railway into a single selling platform for online travel agents and other travel sellers (such as self booking tools and travel management companies) to be able to access and sell any train ticket from a single resource.

Aaron Gowell, our co-founder and CEO, attended the dinner and awards ceremony for the Huffington Post Game Changers ceremony in New York City last night.  It sounds like it was an interesting event.

Aaron unfortunately was not voted as the winner of the Travel / Food category (I think he finished in the middle of the pack), but it is a great honor for all of us at SilverRail to have our mission to improve the ease of booking train travel recognized by the likes of the Huffington Post.

It appears that the big news from the event from scanning the headlines was:

Paul Barrow has just had his first SilverRail anniversary, and is responsible for the producing all of our documentation in SilverCentral, our online developer resources, as well as managing our internal wiki.  Basically, if we didn't have Paul, our customers would be feeling around in the dark trying to implement to our API.  But thanks to Paul, we have an excellent and comprehensive documentation suite that has been extremely helpful for our new partners.  

And like me, Paul is a fellow Brit in the Boston office, so a good partner for rants about the lack of decent tea and Marmite in the US.  Thanks for overcoming your "British reluctance to talk about yourself" Paul, and keep up the great work.

As part of a rail related LinkedIn group that I am a member of, I came across a discussion on a presentation that Mike Ambrose, the Director General of the ERA (Europe Regions Airline Association) gave to the recent press conference for the General Assembly of the ERA entitled "Air and Rail: Setting the record straight on environment, investment, mobility and political bias" (

I got pointed a couple different times to an article that went up recently announcing that Deutsche Bahn, the German national rail carrier, is going to start running trains to China to transport auto parts for BMW between two of its assembly factories.  Even though there are clearly still some challenges in doing that (like having to transport the cargo between trains (twice) to accomodate for the change in track widths) it is still a pretty cool feat, and poses some interesting questions about passenger rail running on a similar route.

Today we’ve received news that is extremely exciting for us at SilverRail and in particular our CEO, and is a great testament to what we are doing and trying to achieve by building this company.

Aaron Gowell, our co-founder and CEO has been nominated by the Huffington Post as one of 100 Game Changers, one of 8 for the Food and Travel category. 

 The German rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, recently released more details about their plans to start running trains through the Channel Tunnel to London.

I'm very pleased to announce that I have been accepted to the PhocusWright Young Leaders Summit at their conference in Florida in November. It sounds like a great program, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to get to know some of the other people involved.