Alternatives to power sockets on trains?

[muz379]

Personally I would always take responsibility for providing my own power . I already have a portable battery back for my phone and tablet which I regularly use . And if I regularly traveled with my laptop I would ensure the battery was fully charged before leaving which would allow even a pretty substantial journey given the battery life of the macbook pro .

I think coaches and trains used for intercity long distance workings should provide power sockets and WI-fi etc because this is certainly what the passenger wants . I dont know about commuter trains used for short distance commuter work It wont do any harm , but it is certainly far from necessary IMO . Out of interests are there any tram systems which have power sockets intended for passenger use ?

I personally would never rely on being able to use said facilities on the train because if there is a fault with the power sockets the train will still be running and it might not be a priority repair , the TOC/coach company might not carry spares etc . I would not expect any compensation in this case either .

Same way I never rely on using wi-fi in coffee shops . It is a nice to have , but as it is secondary to their primary business I would not expect them to shut up shop if there was a problem providing it .

 

[DynamicSpirit]

Did you move the passenger?

No, the seat/powerpoint opposite him was free. So after looking round to see if there were any completely empty tables I could use - and finding there weren't - I sat diagonally opposite him.

And tables. It would be interesting to see the effect if power points were provided *only* at the "bad" seats i.e. tight legroom, no window airline seats.

Agreed, since all the power sockets in Pendolinos are at tables, people might in principle be sitting at those places because of the tables rather than the power sockets. However in this case, most of the power sockets were being used (I looked because I wanted one), which suggests to me it was the power sockets that were the attraction.
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Edited for accuracy!

lol! Very funny!

 

[miami]

And tables. It would be interesting to see the effect if power points were provided *only* at the "bad" seats i.e. tight legroom, no window airline seats.
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As indeed there generally is - seats tend to be on tracks, and power sockets are reasonably easy to add, just as adding them and moving them around in houses is not very hard. But in 2000 power sockets weren't important as your Nokia lasted a week

If I bought a replacement battery for my T410s (second instance of laptop -- first one fell to bits after 3 years). On second SSD now, which actually made me finally upgrade from 10.04 to 14.04!) I reckon I could just about survive a Manchester-London-Work trip unless I'm actually working (rather than dealing with emails)

However after a day of meetings upon meetings - usually in coffee shops and other adhoc places due to cost-cutting removing meeting rooms and actual desks - I rarely have a chance to plug my laptop in, let alone my phone.

Fortunately travelling in the "shoulder peak", before most off-peak tickets start, I get a power socket. In the past I have sat in an airline seat behind a table seat and used the table-seat socket, with cable sneaking through. I'm not the only one, certainly in the evening people walk down the carriage looking for a free socket to charge their phones. It's been this way for 5 years, my iphone 3gs was no better than my 5s (with the 4s I bought a mophie for £70 on a flight flying over the Kara Sea at the lowest point the sun set that day - that meant I rarely needed to charge during the day, but from memory the 5s mophie prevented headphones working correctly so I've never bothered)

If I'm crunching CPU power (say encoding a video file) my laptop battery is down to about 30 minutes. On normal use it's about 75 minutes

I guess this tells me I need a new battery for my laptop:

$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info
design capacity: 3900 mAh
last full capacity: 1206 mAh

Voyagers seem to be far more power-socket friendly though.

Socket's aren't hard. FGW put them in on the cornwall trains, and I believe those Mark-3 carriages predate electricity in general, let alone at the seat. I get 220V (or 110V or something, and workable internet) at 40,000 foot over the indian ocean. Why am I so cut off as I travel from Lichfield to Tamworth?
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I personally would never rely on being able to use said facilities on the train because if there is a fault with the power sockets the train will still be running and it might not be a priority repair , the TOC/coach company might not carry spares etc . I would not expect any compensation in this case either .

I received 10,000 BA avios on a flight a few years back because the empower socket wasn't working, meaning I had to spend an extra hour working on landing. That's worth about £60, plus saving of an hours worth of beer buying and liver damage (but liver damage was offset by chatting to the CSD and having a bottle of champagne bought back from business class)
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There is an issue with USB C cables that Google brought up, where a cable can draw too much power and potentially get hot/melt, although the risk is slight and it's down to the lack of a suitable component in some cheap ones.

If Star Trek is anything to go by, fuses will be a forgotten technology in the future.

 

[edwin_m]

If Star Trek is anything to go by, fuses will be a forgotten technology in the future.

They had fuses on the ship that Han Solo was using in "Force Awakens"... although I suppose that was actually "a long time ago".

 

[61653 HTAFC]

I'm here all week...

 

[krus_aragon]

Ironic that you show us a book discussing "The Colorful[sic] History of the Internet and its Increasingly Problematic Future"...

 

[61653 HTAFC]

Ironic that you show us a book discussing "The Colorful[sic] History of the Internet and its Increasingly Problematic Future"...

It would be ironic if it was intentional! In fact I posted from my phone and wasn't able to read what it actually was, though the spelling of "Colourful" is of course correct in American English (and no, I don't wish to open THAT can of worms!).

 

[tony_mac]

And if you need to do any programming....

(COBOL coding sheets)

 

[krus_aragon]

...though the spelling of "Colourful" is of course correct in American English...

... as well as British English. But the Americans prefer "Colorful". :P

 

[61653 HTAFC]

... as well as British English. But the Americans prefer "Colorful". :P

Just goes to show, I'm usually that much of a stickler for spellings that I let it undermine my own point there!

 

[Fahad]

You can use a portable charger while travelling and they are cheap and easy to find online. They are going by the name of "Power Banks".

 

[krus_aragon]

I was musing on the way to work this morning about how our personal entertainment devices have changed since Pendolinos etc were built. (I'm excluding mobile phones here.) Portable gaming devices (Game Boy Color, Advance) ran on replacable Aa batteries. They could be powered by a mains adapter, but that wouldn't recharge the batteries inside, as a rule. Portable music devices (walkmans, etc) were the same. What originally started as a drive to reduce waste with rechargable batteries has led to a greater dependence on chargers, as fewer devices support replacable battery packs. Now, cue the arrival of rechargable battery packs to recharge the battery in your device. I wonder if anyone's developing a battery pack to recharge your portable battery pack...

 

[jon0844]

You used to be able to buy portable chargers that took regular batteries (Duracell made them - maybe still do?) but I think people would rather recharge, and I'm sure it's better for the environment.

 

[miami]

You used to be able to buy portable chargers that took regular batteries (Duracell made them - maybe still do?) but I think people would rather recharge, and I'm sure it's better for the environment.

And of course far cheaper.

My laptop battery has a design capacity of 3900mAH and a design voltage of 11.1V. To fully charge that, assuming 100% efficency, takes 3.9*11.1 = 43.2WH.

An AA battery has about 2.5WH of power in it, so it would take 17 AA batteries to recharge my laptop, which may last between 1 and 3 hours depending on what I'm doing on it. Add in some actual realism with the efficency and it may be upto 30 batteries though.

When out and about AA batteries with 2.5WH cost about £1-£1.20 (they're cheaper if you buy from a good supplier, in bulk, but typically you'll be using them to recharge because you're stuck, so will be paying kiosk prices), so to recharge a laptop would cost about £35.

That's not a terrible cost, but certainly makes sockets worthwhile.


For what it's worth I walked up the C coach on the 2000 Euston-Piccadilly train last night, about half the sockets were in use before we even pulled out of the station.