Alstom has suspended tickets for The Greatest Gathering after issues following the launch this morning.
10,000 tickets have been available for the show each day, but many users have found the ticket website unresponsive with ‘Bad Gateway’ errors meaning lots of people could not purchase tickets.
Mortons Media then tried introducing a Cloudflare queue system to try and help solve the problem, but users still found after waiting over an hour, that they had problems completing the checkout as there was still too many people on the website.
Ticket sales have been suspended until next week, with reports of plenty of tickets being still available.
Loading the ticket website now states:
The first locomotives confirmed to attend are (Alstom have also noted that examples from the same class may substitute):
- LNER A4 No. 60007 Sir Nigel Gresley – courtesy of the Sir Nigel Gresley Locomotive Trust and Locomotive Services Group
- SR Merchant Navy No. 35018 British India Line – courtesy of West Coast Railways Co
- BR Class 37 No. 37800 Cassiopeia – courtesy of Rail Operations Group
- Class 50 No. 50049 Defiance – courtesy of the Class 50 Alliance
- Class 57 No. 57307 Lady Penelope – courtesy of Direct Rail Services
- Class 66 No. 66315 – courtesy of GB Railfreight
- Class 69 No. 69004 – courtesy of GB Railfreight
- Class 507001 – courtesy of the Class 507 Preservation Society
- Class 390016 (renumbered 390200) – courtesy of Avanti West Coast
- Class 701 No. 701003 – courtesy of South Western Railway
- Class 720 No. 720503 – courtesy of Greater Anglia
Tickets are now on sale and cost £30 for adults and £15 for children, and a family ticket costs £65, and all profits will be split between Alzheimer’s Research UK, Railway Benefit Fund, Railway Children, Railway Mission and Transport Benevolent Fund CIO – and charitable railway heritage partners.
“After yesterday’s fantastic announcement regarding The Greatest Gathering happening at Derby Litchurch Lane in August, our ticketing provider’s site struggled to cope with unprecedented demand from around the world.
“Even with a queuing system in place from mid-morning, this was not enough – and it will take time to secure additional capacity.
“With that in mind, we have made the decision to suspend ticket sales until we are confident that our provider’s servers can handle the expected web traffic.
“Rest assured, there are still thousands of tickets available across the three days and those who have already received a booking confirmation will receive their e-tickets in due course.
“Details of when tickets will return to sale will be promoted on our website – www.alstom.com/greatest-gathering – and our social media channels.”
Alstom spokesperson
Responses
Is this a case of overpromising? Some companies do this regularly and in the same area, for example, Quay Tickets, which handles East Lancashire Railways tickets.
A complete sham, Spent 6 hours try to get tickets for Friday.
1st attempt the system put 6 tickets in my basket instead of 2, when i tried to adjust it, the system crashed.
2nd attempt the system crashed at 1min.
3rd attempt the system was suspended as I got 1min again.
Wasted a complete day trying to get tickets, we never use to have this problem If you wanted tickets for a concert you either wrote or rang the venue ordered your tickets, paid for them by cheque and they arrived in the post, no problem.
Lets hope it sorted next week and we all don`t waste anymore time, trying to buy tickets.
In the old days, when there was an open day at the Carriage and wagon works, you turned up and paid on the gate.
It had nothing to do with “the high demand”. It was clearly all due to a ticket website that was not geared up for any large scale one off event. Quite why Alstom went with them is a question I am sure they are asking themselves. They fixed the front door to the booking hall by bringing in the queue after a few hours. Now they have to sort the booking hall itself. Once in, it should be quick and smooth to select your tickets – then easy to pay and exit. Today it was unusable
Being a patient type of chap I decided to log on and wait for my turn to buy after 1hr 30 mins got through to try and buy a couple of tickets for Friday 1st August – clicked onto the appropriate box and then basket – nothing – tried family ticket -basket nothing – try Sunday ticket- basket – nothing – try Saturday – basket – nothing after 10 minutes my basket appeared showing cost £5860. So time to adjust basket removing Sat and Sunday tickets and reducing Friday to 2 adult. Wait another 5 minutes and my basket shows empty – would you like to buy tickets for another event – No I’m now logged out. Thought the s aren’t going to win so tried to log on to buy again. Message saying due to high demand (and our useless website) sales have been temporarily suspended but don’t worry the site will be open again early next week – so come and waste another few hours of your life
A regrettable start to the main Rail200 event. Spent over 6 hours trying to get tickets with system crashing over and over again and still no tickets. Would have been better using a big event ticket provider such as See tickets or Ticketmaster. At least their systems can cope.