Rail Industry Planning Awards

Award categories

Nominations close on 9 January 2026.

1. Timetable Performance Initiative: the individual or team that has best used a timetable change to drive performance.

2. Emergency plan of the year: the individual or team who have helped the industry respond to an emergency event such as a sustained line closure to keep passengers and freight moving.

3. Event plan of the year: the plan which has best enabled a major special event to occur smoothly and successfully.

4. Customer-driven project of the year: the team or individual that has made a significant contribution to the successful planning or implementation of project that has provided a demonstrable benefit to passengers and end-users. Examples could include new railway infrastructure, implementation of new fleet onto the network, delivery of a new freight flow or freight connection or a technology project that has helped planners to better meet customer needs.

5. Engineering access planning award: the planning team who have dest demonstrated collaboration to deliver a project by facilitating access for engineers whilst minimising disruption for passengers and freight end users.

6. Collaboration of the year: the cross-industry team that has collaborated successfully to achieve outcomes that would otherwise not have been possible by working in isolation.

7. Strategic or long-term planning team of the year: the team who demonstrate making a significant improvement to the long-term timetable, rolling stock or traincrew diagrams.

Examples include completing analysis to support industry decision making in advance of D55 or by implementing an LTP timetable change such as establishing a new connection, introducing a new freight flow, speeding up a journey or increasing capacity for passengers.

8. Short-term planning team of the year: the team or partnership who can demonstrate consistent reliability in their delivery of STP timetable, rolling stock or traincrew diagrams.

Judges will be looking for evidence that the winners really understand and have worked to meet the needs of passenger and the end-users of their outputs.

Examples include evidence of delivering projects at pace, working collaboratively with early engagement, and openly sharing information to agree access or delivering a successful engineering blockade.

9. Outstanding personal contribution (People’s Choice): awarded to the individual who has made a significant difference to the planning community over the last 12-months. Someone who has either made an outstanding personal contribution, has provided great support to their peers, or made a significant difference through training and mentoring.

Nominate now

How do I enter?

You can nominate yourself, your team or colleagues using the nominations form.

Key information

For each award nomination please include:

Category
Your name and contact information
Nominee's contact information (if different to your own)
Description of how you think this person, team or project demonstrates the excellence in this category.

Nominations closed on 9 January 2026.

How to write a good nomination

For project nominations, you will be asked to answer the following:

Character counts include spaces.

What problem was the project addressing? (3000 characters)
What solution was proposed? (3000 characters)
How has success been demonstrated? Please include clear examples with data (4000 characters)

For team and people nominations, you will be asked to answer the following:

Why have you nominated them for this award? Describe their positive impact and include data or evidence to support this. (5000 characters)
Is there any other information you'd like to share in support of this nomination? For example, supporting statements from others, or data evidence. (4000 characters)

Make sure to include the following in your nomination:

Your supporting statement should:

be relevant to the award for which you're nominating a person, team or project
provide a summary of the nominee’s specific challenges faced, actions taken, and results or goals met.
include outcomes, results, statistics, and/or activities “above and beyond” the nominee’s job description
include qualities that make this person, team or project outstanding, and that are clearly relevant to the award criteria (e.g. Teamwork, collaboration, leadership etc)
avoid sweeping generalities
answer the “who, what, when, where, why, how” in your supporting statements
- who was involved and what did they do?
- what did the nominee do and why? e.g. projects, activities, outputs
- when and where did these positive results occur (e.g. a particular area of the railway network)
- what were the results and/or impact? e.g. benefits, change, personal
- how did they do it? e.g. initiative, leadership, teamwork, creativity, behaviours