December 2025 Update
- Joe Brown
- Dec 21, 2025
- 4 min read
Season's greetings and welcome to the Journey December update - our last of a very successful 2025!
At the last Journey meeting on December 16th, our focus was on the intersection between being LGBTQ+ and disability through sharing information about disabilities which disproportionately affect LGBTQ+ people: mental health illnesses, neurodivergence, and HIV/AIDS. We chose this theme as December sees World AIDS Day on the 1st, and International Day of Persons with Disabilities on the 3rd. The approach was a combination of education and signposting tailored to LGBTQ+ network leaders, we hope it was helpful.
On the subject of World AIDS Day, on November 25th and 27th volunteers from several transport organisations kindly gave up their precious time to raise funds for Terrence Higgins Trust at three London termini: London Bridge, Charing Cross and Waterloo. In combination we raised £1,175 which is fantastic, thanks so much to the dozens of you who supported this.
The second part of the December meeting was a look-back over a really successful 2025 for Journey - only our second full year of existence! There were so many highlights it was hard to know where to begin. Our three in-person London events partnered with KPMG, DfT, and TfL featuring Tim Dunn, Asifa Lahore and Jason Jones were so powerful and a fantastic opportunity to network. We will continue these events next year, if anyone has ideas for themes / speakers please let us know, and it would be wonderful to hold similar events in other cities. Massive thanks to KPMG for their generosity in hosting these events.
We delivered a year of themed webinars and online panel discussions covering a wide range of topics and exploring different LGBTQ+ identities, supported by several of your networks, as well as being able to share details across the Journey membership for many other events and webinars that you have kindly shared with us.
Pride season saw Journey members at numerous events across the country, with the opportunity to participate in parades and to meet up with other people from the sector. For the second year running we had a stall at Medway Pride in Rochester collaborating with several other organisations, reinforcing the power of local pride events through the opportunity to engage with the community to discuss LGBTQ+ safety on transport and careers in the industry. The summer also saw a wonderful queer walking tour in Central London led by past Journey event speakers Dan Glass and Julian Hows to mark what would have been Terrence Higgins' 80th birthday, this culminated with our third summer picnic in St James's Park where we raised £450 for Terrence Higgins Trust through a raffle.
Another highlight on the look-back was the world's first Pride parade on a train at Alstom's Greatest Gathering in Derby to mark Railway 200 in August. It was an outlandish idea which had to evolve at a fast pace, even on the day itself, but we were there and we were loud, colourful and fabulous. Alstom's social media coverage of us elicited a sadly predictable hate-fuelled response, but the push-back was fantastic most notably Tracey Barber writing about the importance of allyship in Modern Railways. The success of this event led to Journey's first ever awards shortlist at the Railstaff Awards in Birmingham: while we were pipped to the D&I award, Greatest Gathering won overall so some of us were privileged to help Ben Goodwin and the wider team collect their award. There is another shortlist in the pipeline for the Rail Business Awards in February, so watch this space!
Much more recently, on 10th December many of us were privileged to have a dedicated Pride tour of Siemens Mobility's Goole factory in Yorkshire where the new generation of London's Tube trains are currently under construction. Huge thanks to the team at Siemens for kindly organising and hosting the event. And finally, on December 17th many of us came together for the third London festive social, returning to the lovely Rising SE1 venue for the hilarious drag quiz which runs every Wednesday. It was so good to see so many faces, both familiar and new!
On the look ahead, we have some great events coming up in early 2026. As always, keep an eye on our events page.
On Thursday 22nd January, we are partnering with Rail Wellbeing Live for their first ever LGBTQ+ themed webinar: Journey to better LGBTQ+ wellbeing. You need to register, but it's free, and there is a wealth of other great webinars to choose from. This replaces the Journey meeting for January.
On Tuesday 10th February for the first Journey meeting of 2026 we're pencilling in a webinar on science & innovation, which is the LGBT History Month 2026 theme. We're hoping to explore the contributions of LGBTQ+ people to engineering innovation in transport, past and present - please let us know if you want to support this.
On Thursday 12th February evening we're back at KPMG in London's Canary Wharf for a History Month queer-and-transport themed quiz, hosted by our resident Tube-driving drag queen Felicia. It'll be a charity fundraiser and a lot of fun - ideally we'll have teams from Journey member organisations pitted against each other, so please save the date and start assembling your team of 4-6 people. We'll share the Eventbrite for this when it's available.
On Friday 27th March afternoon we are delighted to be able to offer an LGBTQ+ themed tour of the National Railway Museum in York where we will be able to explore the exhibits through an LGBTQ+ lens and also hear about the wonderful People, Pride and Progress oral histories project that so many of you were involved in. We'll look to arrange a dinner/social in York that evening too.
If you have any events, in-person or online, that you would like to share with a wider audience please let us know.
Thanks to all of you for your engagement and contributions over the past year, wishing you all a wonderful festive period and we hope you get some quality downtime with friends and family. See you in 2026!
The Journey team
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