Win Report: How closing a gap with competitors increased Churnet Valley Railway’s ticket sales by 10%

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how redesigning a dining product page increased ticket sales by 10%.

Side-by-side control and variation screenshots of the Churnet Valley Railway Breakfast Train page, showing the narrow, text-heavy original beside a full-width redesign with a hero image, inline booking calendar, Trustpilot rating, and structured menu sections.

Churnet Valley Railway is a heritage steam railway running through the Staffordshire Moorlands in the UK. The attraction welcomes tens of thousands of visitors each year, and is genuinely loved. It holds a 4.8‑star rating on Trustpilot and has thousands of glowing reviews about the trains, the dining experiences, and the team.

This Win Report is a deeper look at a test we touched on in our case study: How a website redesign delivered the best year ever for Churnet Valley Railway.

A green heritage steam locomotive pulling maroon carriages through wooded Staffordshire countryside, billowing white steam against a bright autumn sky.

Research: Seeing a competitive gap

Following early redesign wins on the client’s homepage, we turned our attention to other high-traffic pages. In addition to the standard train rides, the railway offers popular dining experiences like the Breakfast Train or the Sunday Lunch Train. Like the railway itself, the dining trains were wildly popular with people who’d experienced them, but far less convincing to first-time bookers on the website.

During our standard exit surveys, we always ask non-converting visitors why they didn’t convert. For almost every client, the top reason is price, but Churnet Valley Railway’s visitors had an unusual response.

Bar chart of exit-survey responses to ‘If you didn’t book with us today, can you please tell us why? We love blunt feedback!', with ‘Researching options’ the clear leader at 23%, followed by price concerns at 12% and availability of dates at 11%; the remaining answers are blurred out.

23% of the respondents told us they were “researching options,” which is often a polite way of saying the site hadn’t convinced them to make a decision. If you’ve read our case study for Churnet Valley Railway, you’ll also know that the company had competitors whose websites felt “modern,” “fresh,” and “family friendly.”

Aside from research and price, understanding availability and journey dates was a key concern that competitors also handled better. Although we had addressed that issue for general train rides on the homepage, it made sense to apply the work we’d done there to one of the dining pages.

The original page (or control)

Here’s the original page for the Breakfast Train. The booking button took visitors directly to another website to research dates, the food menu felt workmanlike, and the images felt disconnected from the main content.

The original Churnet Valley Railway Breakfast Train page, with a small italic menu floating in white space, a column of unlabeled thumbnail photos down the right, twelve collapsed FAQ accordions, and a single ‘Book Now’ button at the top.

The tested page (or variation)

We rebuilt the Breakfast Train product page using some of the design elements created for the previous win, and added some new features.

The redesigned Breakfast Train page, leading with a full-width hero photograph, an availability calendar and ‘Book Now’ panel above the fold, a Trustpilot rating, and illustrated breakfast and drinks menus alongside a ‘What’s included’ checklist.

The full redesign included:

“Live” calendar and key information: The top of the new page included the price, the standard departure time (10:30am from Froghall), the next available date, and a calendar that visibly marks sold-out and no-service dates. We also added the Trustpilot review widget immediately below the first section.
Photography that better sells the experience: A single, close-up shot of the breakfast replaces the old collage banner, with additional food photography next to the main description.
A detailed menu with clear dietary marks: Every dish is given a description, a photograph, and a visible dietary indicator.
A drink menu: Previously absent. Now its own section, with wines by the bottle or glass, local craft beers, ales, prosecco, and sodas.
A “What’s Included” checklist: Useful for visitors to see what they’ll get… and useful for the railway to build up the value included for the £28.50 ticket.
Clearer paths to the booking step: Anchor-tab navigation under the hero (About | Menu | Drinks | What’s Included | FAQ | Check Running Times), and the green Check Running Times & Book Tickets button repeated in the hero, after What’s Included, and again before the FAQ block. (Leading with check running times is a good example of The Safe Step Principle at work.)

And here’s the mobile version:

Mobile view of the redesigned Breakfast Train page, with a ‘Most popular’ flash on the hero, the price, departure time and next available date stated up front, a ‘Seats sell out fast’ line, and a booking calendar showing sold-out dates in red against available ones in green.

Result: Ticket sales increased by 10%

During the test, we observed a 10% increase in Breakfast Train bookings.

By creating a more modern design and highlighting the practical information at the top of the page, we increased the page’s cognitive fluency—the principle that information which is easier to process is also easier to trust and act on. The purchase funnel was back on the rails.

What’s next

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Churnet Valley Railway’s business and then to other clients. The template proved portable enough that we ran the same play on a second dining product page soon after—with an even bigger result.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to Churnet Valley Railway for letting us share these insights (and for being such a great team to work with).

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