Decide what you are trying to achieve and why.

If you want to get feedback from local people about the railway, their aspirations for the future and to encourage their general involvement in their line or station, continue reading these tips. If instead you want to attract volunteers or station gardeners, click the links to find out more.

If you have a local rail users’ group or station friends’ group, make early contact with them. You will quickly pick up a lot of views about the present and aspirations for the future.

If there is a Community Rail Partnership for the line, it is very likely that there will already be a good deal of citizen and stakeholder involvement, so especially make sure you get in contact with them.

Next, hold a “Bright ideas” meeting locally. Invite the railway, local government bodies (especially the one responsible for transport in the area) and representatives of the groups and organisations you have identified as possibly being interested.

Rail users’ and station friends groups should have more than one invite, but be careful not to invite so many from these groups that they dominate the meeting.

Have no more than three short introductory “Setting the scene” presentations, one of these must be by the railway. You should do another. Then have general questions and answers, followed by breaking the meeting up into groups for each group to brainstorm their aspirations for the future, which are then fed back to the main meeting.

The meeting and what comes out of it will help to frame an action plan and be the basis of discussion at future meetings.

Following the “Bright Ideas” meeting, the next step is to draw up an action plan. Ideally you should do this with a small group formed from the “Bright Ideas” meeting but, whatever you do, you should involve any rail user or station friends’ groups already active and must involve both the train operating company and the local authority responsible for transport in the area.

Don’t underestimate the time things take – even apparently simple rail projects can and often do take a long time and much longer than you may have originally anticipated. Bear this in mind when putting together the action plan and take the advice of the train operating company and local authority.

You may also wish to establish a regular forum. The forum would pick up from the “Bright Ideas” meeting, focus on the Action Plan and would always include a short presentation by the rail representative. Ideally the Action Plan should be the Forum’s Action Plan.

A tip – it is strongly advised that the forum doesn’t focus on individual problems on individual trains. People should be advised to take these up direct with the railway as soon as possible after they happen.

The important thing is that there is progress and that people see that at least some of the things that people have raised are being actively pursued with an explanation why others are not.

If you do not wish or have the capacity to set up a forum, then it would be best instead to go, perhaps, for an annual meeting where people review action plan progress and discuss the line and its services.