Case Study: thetrainline.com achieves continuous delivery, a scalable retail platform and increased earnings with ThoughtWorks

thetrainline.com - Customer Case Study

thetrainline.com is the UK’s leading online rail retailer, handling millions of passengers and hundreds of millions of fare combinations, but by 2006 its ageing platform was slow to add features and customers, costly to operate, and unable to scale—one re-platform attempt had already failed and the company faced real capacity and commercial risk (exposed dramatically during events like the 2010 volcanic ash disruption).

ThoughtWorks rebuilt the platform on a SOA/Web 2.0 stack and implemented an automated continuous-delivery pipeline (using tools like Go and Mingle), virtualized and consolidated the data center, and standardized testing and release processes. The result: faster, more reliable releases (from months to 4–8 weeks), test times cut from days to hours, server count reduced from ~250 to ~70 with >£1M annual savings, higher developer productivity and earnings, improved market share and valuation, and much quicker onboarding of new train operators.

thetrainline.com