Dave Stamper

Said the following about Merseyrail's Exceptional Event group:

“Hosting Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine was a fantastic honour for the city of Liverpool and also provided a huge logistic issue for the local rail network. Luckily for Merseyrail the Exceptional Events Group embraced this challenge.

Lots of people think Eurovision is just one event on a Saturday night, but oh no. Over a period of a week there are a total on 9 sold out arena events a fan village based on the waterfront running every day with a capacity of 15,000 as well as every pub and club in the city running their own events. The week also commenced with a concert on the streets of the city (outside Lime St station) for 25k fans.

The event was a real unknown with the organisers itself advising us to expect well over 100,000 people to be in the city on the final night, the group had to come up with a new and innovative plan to increase capacity and to manage the vast crowds.

To this end our group, consisting of staff from all internal functions as well at Network rail, BTP and the local authority came up with a new and unique plan. The plan doubled capacity every night of the week leading up to the big night and on the day of the final a brand-new timetable was created to release resources to give us the ability to run 25 extra services after normal service ends up to 02:00, allowing for 20,000 extra capacity after midnight. The whole transport plan was managed by a transport co-ordination with all the other transport provider hosted by the local authority.

The station team implemented a bespoke plan including a faster more efficient loading process on the platforms, with every station staffed with Merseyrail volunteers. The event went off perfectly and a fantastic atmosphere made the event one to remember. Teamwork at its finest.“