Great British Railways (GBR) presents an opportunity to give Great Britain’s rail network a useful identity for the first time in decades. Taking inspiration from Switzerland’s SBB CFF FFS – which has long used a clear, colour-coded category system to distinguish all services, from local stopping services to international ones – I wanted to explore what that kind of system might look like applied to Britain’s railways.
The result is a proposed set of seven service categories: International (IX), Intercity (IC), Interregional (IR), Regional (RE), Local (L), Sleeper (S), and Charter (C), each with its own distinct colour and identity.
To bring the idea to life, I created an interactive CIS builder (with a little help from AI!) – a tool that lets you design and preview what a GBR customer information screen might look like in practice. You can define a route, select a service category, add calling points, set a current position, and configure the running status – from on time through to part-cancelled — and see it rendered in real time as a faithful mock-up of an in-carriage display.
The whole thing is built as a single self-contained HTML file, partly as a technical exercise and partly because I think the best way to argue for a design system is to show it working.