5AT Website

5AT Website


The 5AT Project website was first set up on 27th Jun 2002 and quite rapidly gained a wide readership from all over the world.  A screen image of the original website is shown below.

A “hit counter” (as used over the first months) recorded an average of around 30 visitors to the site each day during its first 12 months of operation.  However, on 11th Oct 2003, immediately following the Brienz-Presentation about the project given by Alan Fozard at the International Conference on Steam and Tourist Railways at Brienz in Switzerland, Jonathan Glancy published an article in the Guardian newspaper titled “Steam power on track for great renaissance” (a PDF copy of the article can be found here). Over the next week, the 5AT website received over 350 viewers per day.  Similar fluctuations occurred whenever articles were published about the project, with occasional peaks rising to around 300 with visits from 132 countries on every continent.

The website generated correspondence from all over the world, and the group’s records show that expressions of interest in the project have been received from over 400 individuals living in at least 32 countries, most of whom found out about the project through the website.

A more sophisticated CMS-based website was established in April 2010 as part of the 5AT Project’s public launch of its Feasibility Study.  An screen-print of its Home page is shown below:

The website was substantially reorganized and updated in March 2012 when the project’s suspension was announced, however in May 2017 the site was effectively lost when its hosting service provider moved its files onto a new server and broke the digital links that held it all together.  The site’s pages were therefore transferred onto this “5AT section” of ASTT’s website.