It’s mid-January, the time of the year where I pause to mark the anniversary of me launching this site by looking back at the year gone, and thinking about the year yet to come.
This year marks the fifteenth anniversary of this website. That’s the sort of round number I’d normally want to mark in a slightly more interesting way, but truth be told I have no decent ideas, and history has shown any efforts in that direction to usually go unrewarded anyway. I will end the post later on with some all-time stats and favourite posts, though.
I didn’t write a review of 2025 as I did for 2024 (I don’t do these often, but I felt 2024 warranted it as I had proclaimed it my ‘Year of Photography’), so I will have a quick look back on the year before looking back a bit further.
I managed to stick rigidly to a fortnightly posting schedule throughout 2025 (save for More Festive Bokeh, which I posted two days ahead of schedule in order to have it land on Christmas Eve, the same day its predecessor post did 11 years previously). Having a strict schedule has its pros and cons; I suspect I would have found it difficult to maintain posting without a defined plan, so it has forced me to keep posting – but at the same time, more posts are a case of ‘I did this, then I did that’ without the level of insight or the lighthearted tone I would prefer to have, the result of not waiting until inspiration struck to post something and forcing myself to write.
The assortment of posts throughout 2025 was pretty varied. Amid a healthy scattering of railway content were posts from my backlog (like Shoreham or More Random Cornwall), posts shot not long before I posted them (like Valebridge Pond or Trek to Nutley Windmill), and posts containing some of the best stuff I think I’ve done (like Return to the South Downs Way or British Wildlife Centre). The most interesting backlog post was probably Just Some Guy, a collection of photographs of a model from 2012 that I never actually edited (either because I wasn’t feeling positive about the results, or because it was shot after a very photo-heavy safari photography experience so I didn’t have the energy). It was one of those times where editing the shots almost 13 years later probably brought better results, and I was actually pleased with the finished shots. Another interesting one is Devil’s Dyke, mostly because I wrote that post in 2020 or 2021, and had kept it in reserve for a time when I was unable to get another post ready in time. It was finally posted on October 17th, when I was out shooting the first day of the Giants of Steam gala.
Speaking of posts waiting for their time, there is another post which is probably my most postponed of all time, one containing a batch of my smaller trips out to the Bluebell Railway. That post has been put on the schedule and then pulled for various reasons multiple times in 2025. It still hasn’t seen the light of day, but it will be out in early 2026 as a roundup of my 2025 trips to the railway – I expect there will be another one for my 2026 outings in a year’s time.
In 2025 I also posted my 400th post, although post numbers aren’t something I’ve marked since my 100th post (although it is sometimes a bit depressing to compare how quickly I hit 100 posts to how long it took to post the subsequent 300). Speaking of post counts, after reviving the Daily Photo in late 2024, I’ve managed to maintain it, posting daily for over 400 consecutive days at this point (thanks in no small part to scheduling most of them in advance). The success of that has only been modest, usually picking up only a handful of likes across the website, Instagram, Bluesky, Mastodon, and its fediverse feed (but for some reason, rarely picking up any interest at all on Threads or Facebook).
My biggest success has been my train-centric sub-brand, RobDoesTrains. On Instagram, I now have over 1,500 followers (admittedly helped by a post going mini-viral a couple of weeks ago that’s brought in almost 200 new followers, although it remains to be seen how many of them actually stick around), regularly get a decent amount of interaction on all my posts, and have even been out on multiple photo trips with people I’ve met from the community I’ve become a part of. I started off 2026 by working further to develop this brand, launching a YouTube account (which has already attracted almost 16,000 views on only a few shorts) and Facebook page.
Clearly, I am loving photographing trains. It has become my most reoccurring theme on this site over fifteen years of shooting. That said, I’m still very keen to keep shooting a variety of subjects and styles, and to post them in a varied order too – to this point, I’ve managed to avoid sharing two train posts back-to-back, even in late summer/early autumn when I attend a railway gala every month, although I suspect that will become more of a challenge in 2026.
Overall, then, 2025 managed to be decent improvement over 2024 in every way I can think of. I started 2025 with a few goals and resolutions. Other than maintaining my momentum of shooting and posting, my two main goals were shooting a Red Arrows display, and a fireworks display. Luck was very much in my favour for the former, as our holiday in Swanage that summer overlapped with the start of their carnival, meaning the Red Arrows came to me. Those shots came out pretty well, but I am a bit rusty with shooting aerobatic displays, it seems. I fared less well with getting out to shoot any firework displays. As with the previous year, any of the displays near us were a drive away, and it turns out we missed a few, which started as early as October in some cases. So that goal has carried over into 2026, and we’ll be looking into displays in our area a lot earlier than last time. My other goals for 2026 are, as you might expect, a little bit more train-centric. Firstly, I want to attend a gala at the Swanage Railway. I’ve been there a bunch of times during normal running days and taken photographs from a variety of spots around Swanage station, but in 2026 I want to get down there for a more intense gala, hopefully alongside some people who know a lot of the other good spots to shoot the railway. Similarly, I would like to visit Spa Valley Railway, my second-nearest heritage railway, to see engine № 828 running (because it’s blue) and learn some of the good locations to shoot that railway. These two goals alone might make it a challenge to not post railway content back-to-back, considering I still have a post of Bluebell trips, two visits to the Swanage Railway, and another collection of mainline steam to post, and that’s before you take into account any of my planned visits to the Bluebell. We’ll see how it goes.
Also in my goals for 2025 was a bunch of housekeeping, cleaning up areas of the site that haven’t been looked at properly in years. I didn’t really get round to that, so it again has ended up on my list for 2026. Most pressingly, I need to clean up the categories my posts are catalogued under, which haven’t been touched in over a decade. I also need to clean up the widgets at the bottom of all my post pages, which also haven’t been touched in years and are all balancing precariously on legacy code. I also need to clean up my kit page. Although I’ve been good at adding new kit, the descriptions for most of them have not been updated since they were first written, making the page an increasingly long, self-contradictory mess. At some point I may also need to replace some older, very poorly optimised images across the site with newer versions to save some space, although that isn’t particularly pressing at the moment. These all seem slightly daunting tasks so I’m not holding my breath that I’ll get round to them this year, but who knows when the motivation will strike.
By the numbers, 2025 was an improvement on 2024, with numbers up across the board – not bad considering the the numbers in 2024 were pretty healthy, at least for this site.
The total of 9,449 views in 2025 is the highest yearly total I’ve had, save for the anomalous spike in March 2012 when 43,000 people visited on account of one of my posts (Borough Market) being featured on the WordPress front page. Time will tell if that’s a trend or an outlier.
As it has been for quite a few years, Boscastle Pottery was the top performing post by quite a clear margin. I continue to put this down to some accidental SEO on my part, aided by the fact that the Boscastle Pottery shop itself doesn’t have a web presence. Excluding pages (such as the homepage or my kit page), the second most popular post of 2025 was Lineside at the Bluebell Railway, a post from the middle of 2024, and second was The Coin Tree, from earlier in the same year. The best performing post actually posted in 2025 was Bluebell Railway: Giants of Steam 2025, which I’m happy with considering it was posted at the end of October and only had a couple of months to make its mark.
Since I’m marking 15 years of this site, it seems like a good opportunity to look at the all-time stats for this site. As it happens, a couple of months ago this site crossed 100,000 total views – again, helped by 43% of them being a spike 13 years ago. A milestone to be pleased with, and not one I was paying attention to. That said, and at the risk of belabouring the point about my other Instagram account, RobDoesTrains has had over 168,000 views just in the last 90 days – although admittedly this is comparing apples to oranges (just to throw some bananas into the mix, my Flickr account, which had a five year head start on this site, not that I used it much back then, has accumulated 893,000 posts since 2006).
Looking at the top posts over the last decade and a half, Boscastle Pottery reigns supreme here too, having overtaken Borough Market in 2023 or 2024. I expect it to cross 10,000 cumulative views on its own relatively early in 2026. Those two are leagues ahead of the rest of my posts, or even individual pages like my homepage. The top 10 posts are, with their year of publication and total views (which admittedly will change as soon as you click on any of the links, not that that should deter you):
- Boscastle Pottery (2013, 9,910 views)
- Borough Market (2012, 7,438 views)
- RTX London 2017 (2017, 451 views)
- London at Night: Covent Garden (2012, 288 views)
- Lineside at the Bluebell Railway (2024, 265 views)
- Lemurs and Marsupials (2014, 262 views)
- The Coin Tree (2024, 259 views)
- Bournemouth Air Festival (2011, 251 views)
- London Fashion Weekend (2013, 203 views)
- [Doodle] Mr Supremo (2012, 199 views)
The gaps between 2nd and 3rd place, and to a lesser extent 3rd place and the rest of the pack, are pretty stark. While it’s not surprising a lot of the top ten posts are over a decade old, having had plenty of time to accrue views, it’s great to see a new newer posts have managed to surge into the running in less than two years. It’s also very interesting to me that a non-photography post snuck into the top ten.
Some standout posts for me over the years include Borough Market, Return to the South Downs Way, London Fashion Weekend, Derelict, and Rooster Teeth UK 2022. These are mainly ones that stick in my mind, so I’m sure there’s others I’m not thinking of, but these are ones where I’m really proud of the results I got.
I think this website shows the development of my photography over the last 15 years. Whilst sometimes I look back at shots and see some gems from the early days, there’s a clear progression from some frankly flaky photography to some of the stuff I’m making now. I’ve still got plenty of room to grow.
Anyway, I have definitely waffled on for long enough now. Thank you, as always, for reading – especially If you’re one of the people who has been following me for a long time.
Rob
Creative Splurges 