March 2026 update

Hello Journey Members,

Apologies, it's been two months since the last newsletter... there was a lot going on during History Month! Firstly, Journey can now insert "award winning..." before our name, after picking up the Diversity & Inclusion Award at the Rail Business Awards in Manchester on 19th February. We won alongside Alstom for the 'Pride on Rails' event at last summer's Greatest Gathering in Derby: our first industry award, not bad going for a three year old network. Huge thanks to everyone who made this possible, in particular Pip Armstrong and Ben Goodwin from Alstom, and our queens Connie Tactless (Alex), Felicia (Lee), and Medusa (Tony).

Next piece of news, we now have an Instagram account: @journey.lgbt please follow us!

We’ve also made an update to our website and launched Journey Communities. Exclusive to registered users, this part of the website allows members to share updates and network with each other. We’ve created a starter community for all members which you’re welcome to join now, and all website members will receive an invite later this week. Also feel free to create any sub-communities and invite other members. We hope you find this a useful feature!

We are also delighted to share with you the first draft of our survey report. The Journey LGBTQ+ transport worker survey started just over a year ago in History Month 2025, and so far we have heard from more than 250 of you. Our member Becky Shortt has very kindly produced the first draft and presented to our March Journey meeting, seeking feedback about some of the themes arising from the initial results. You can review the draft report here within the March meeting slides. If you would like to share any thoughts with us about the questions posed on slide 20 or generally, please send us a message. We will finalise the report in the coming weeks and circulate it to network leaders, we hope it will be useful for you to engage with your organisations about the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in transport, backed by some data.

Some other things on the look-back: on 6th February, our member Forest Parkinson-Mearns, vice chair of TfL's OUTbound network and Videographer at the London Transport Museum, accepted a poster into the LT Museum collection from the 1988 'Never going Underground' anti-Section 28 campaign from Ian Wilmott and Paul Fairweather, both activists for that campaign in Manchester which resulted in the largest LGBTQ+ rights march in history. Legendary activist and former Tube Guard Julian Hows was also on hand, it's always a huge pleasure to see them! The poster borrowed the London Transport 'roundel' symbol, so it felt very fitting as the 40th anniversary approaches that a poster was accepted into the museum's collection.

On 10th February, our monthly Journey meeting was a webinar focused on the LGBTQ+ History Month 2026 theme: Science & Innovation. We celebrated the contributions of LGBTQ+ people to science & Innovation in transport both past and present. Paras Shah from Arup hosted the event, with speakers Joe Brown from TfL, Scott Heath from Hitachi Rail, Kayleigh Glover from Siemens Mobility, and Pip Armstrong from Alstom providing insights stretching from Charles Beyer in the 19th century through to cutting-edge engineering as LGBTQ+ people today shape the future of transport. You can watch the recording here.

On 12th February, KPMG's Breathe network generously hosted our History Month charity fundraiser trivia quiz 'Pride on the Line' in London. 50 of us enjoyed a hilarious evening hosted by Felicia aka Tube driver Lee, raising £600 in the process for Terrence Higgins Trust. Massive thanks to Lee, KPMG, DfT, Hitachi and TfL for organising the event, we already sense this will become an annual institution!

More recently, on Friday 27th March, several of us were fortunate enough to enjoy a tour of the National Railway Museum in York through a uniquely queer lens. The wonderful Ashlynn Hudson-Welburn, curator at the NRM, guided us around the exhibits while sharing the stories of LGBTQ+ contributions to railways and in turn the impact that railways have had on LGBTQ+ culture. We then had our first ever York social which was great fun, thank you to everyone who made the trip to York to join us. You can read more in the blog post here.

Our April meeting shifts back a couple of weeks to Wednesday 22nd April 15:00-16:00 as we mark Lesbian Visibility Week 2026 with a panel discussion focused on the 2026 theme: health and wellbeing. We'll be putting the event with Teams link up on the website very soon, so please watch this space for that. If you're interested in being a panellist for that webinar, please let us know. Likewise, we'll hold our May meeting in week commencing Monday 18th where we'll be marking IDAHOBIT (International day against homophobia, biphobia and transphobia) which falls on 17th May, again if you're interested in assisting with organising or being a panellist please let us know. We will look to build on our survey results, exploring how we can protect LGBTQ+ transport workers in customer facing roles, as well as protecting LGBTQ+ customers using transport.

On the topic of panellists, our partners myGwork are gearing up for their annual WorkPride event, an incredible series of webinars between 8th and 12th June. Please browse the topics, if you feel you have something to contribute to any of the panels then the team there would be very keen to hear from you. Further ahead, we'd also like to share our sibling network Aviation pride UK's annual Pride in the Skies pride celebration 3rd to 5th July.

We're organising some exciting events ourselves over the summer, we'll share more details when we can but one will certainly be the annual London summer picnic in St James's Park - as soon as we can pin down the date we'll let you know... potentially 23rd July, but that's definitely TBC at this stage so just a light pencil in the calendar.

Thanks so much to you all for your contributions to Journey over the past few weeks, and we look forward to seeing you at an event soon!

The Journey Team