Updated, 28th Jan 2012

Welcome to the National Rail website hosted by Chester-le-Track, based at the real railway station at Chester-le-Street in County Durham on the East Coast  Main Line.  We provide rail information and enable you to buy tickets with two booking engines. We also have excellent deals on hotels through Superbreaks,  and these accommodation deals can be combined with fully inclusive rail packages not available to rail-only purchasers.  
Our real station is open at Chester-le-Street until 1800 Monday to Friday and 1300 Saturday and Bank Holidays.  We open at 0730 evey day of the week  except Sundays.  We try to post out tickets issued at our station same day first class, so you will normally get them the following day. Saturday orders will be  posted on Monday.

Our staff team are Helen 1, Helen 2, David and Justin plus apprentices Andrew, Toni and Jason. Toni is presently on part time secondment to East Coast, to help them out a bit.

Work is nearly finished on our new station project at Eaglescliffe in the Tees Valley, between Yarm and Stockton. We epect to announce an openign date shortly now that telephone lines have been fitted.  Jason and new staff member Martin will be working at Eaglecliffe.

Blackfriars station in London is now served by 12 carriage trains on new platforms spanning the Thames which now has entrances on both sides of the Thames.  The Underground station at Blackfriars should re-open on 26th February on the Circle and District lines. The rebuilding work at Blackfriars Underground has been  completed by Network Rail on behalf of TfL.  The Dockland Light Railway route to the stupidly named Stratford International station from Canning Town is now  fully open.  Stratford international is not an international station since it will never be served by trains to and from the continent, and would have been better named Stratford Olympic.

We are pleased to announce that the domain name nationalrail.com has been transferred finally to Chester-le-Track following an ownership dispute with the principal of our former hosting company.  This has led to various disruptions to service between 21st December and now, including two periods where the domain was up for sale to the highest bidder with a reserve price of (only) £7,500.  Service has  been uninterrupted at our other domains, e.g. stn.co.uk (a nice short name, stn being the common abbreviation for station), chester-le-track.co.uk and our new domain name eaglescliffe.tv for the new development at Eaglescliffe near Stockton.  This has been a very stressful period in the history of Chester-le-Track but the issue is now resolved without the use of court action.  The whole story will be written up in due course.

Alex Nelson Stationmaster, Chester-le-Street