I subscribe to some TOC Twitter feeds because they are sometimes the only way to get up-to-the-minute information about journey problems. However, they're a bit of a crude information tool, and 99% of the tweets are not relavent to your journey.
Realtimetrains.co.uk is of course invaluable for showing you where trains are right now, but even that is sometimes wrong, and it doesn't show known future problems.
What I'm after is a single website that gives up-to-date information on any given train. Nationalrail.co.uk typically shows line-related rather than train-related issues and is usually an hour or so out of date. But please let me know if there's something better out there.
To illustrate my point, here's an example from last Friday evening where a little bit of extra information could have made an awful journey pleasant.
I was due to travel from Nuneaton to Euston on a first-class ticket. All the evidence I could find on the web suggested that there would be no problems with my train other than that it had sufferered a 14-minute delay leaving Crewe. Yet if I had known, as Virgin already did, that my seat reservation was worthless and I would have to stand, I could have gone from Coventry instead.
I learnt from fellow passengers that a train caught up in the earlier Lancaster-area problems had set down its passengers at Crewe from where they were put on the service from Liverpool to Euston. These poor passengers were mainly coming from Scotland and had endured several hours of delay. At Crewe, the LIV-EUS train was declassified, seat reservations were withdrawn and first-class service, such as it is during holidays, was cancelled.
The train was delayed because the train weight sensors were saying that standard-class was overloaded, and the many standing passengers had to be distributed more evenly throughout the carriages. The carriages were also running temperatures in the high 20s, so it was uncomfortably hot except in the vestibules.
As soon as Virgin's Ops team decided to put all of these passengers on to the LIV-EUS train at Crewe, it would have been very useful if there were some way to let passengers at subsequent stops (Stafford and Nuneaton, in this case) know that the train was already over-full and to take an alternative service if possible.
Nuneaton station monitors have sometimes displayed information to this effect, so I know it's possible to record and report it. Is there anywhere that this would be visible on the web before you get to the station?
In my own experience, which is mainly at weekends, trains being declassified and seat reservations being withdrawn, are all-too-frequent events. Not letting passengers further down the line know there is a problem just compounds the already miserable experience onboard when extra passengers try to pile on and arguments ensue over reserved seats.
Currently, some limited information on trains that will terminate early or skip stops is provided via Twitter, but it's by no means guaranteed, and it can be hard to find the pertinent tweets.
There's an opportunity here for some cross-TOC co-operation on providing detailed service updates via the web so that known near-future issues can be relayed.
Realtimetrains.co.uk is of course invaluable for showing you where trains are right now, but even that is sometimes wrong, and it doesn't show known future problems.
What I'm after is a single website that gives up-to-date information on any given train. Nationalrail.co.uk typically shows line-related rather than train-related issues and is usually an hour or so out of date. But please let me know if there's something better out there.
To illustrate my point, here's an example from last Friday evening where a little bit of extra information could have made an awful journey pleasant.
I was due to travel from Nuneaton to Euston on a first-class ticket. All the evidence I could find on the web suggested that there would be no problems with my train other than that it had sufferered a 14-minute delay leaving Crewe. Yet if I had known, as Virgin already did, that my seat reservation was worthless and I would have to stand, I could have gone from Coventry instead.
I learnt from fellow passengers that a train caught up in the earlier Lancaster-area problems had set down its passengers at Crewe from where they were put on the service from Liverpool to Euston. These poor passengers were mainly coming from Scotland and had endured several hours of delay. At Crewe, the LIV-EUS train was declassified, seat reservations were withdrawn and first-class service, such as it is during holidays, was cancelled.
The train was delayed because the train weight sensors were saying that standard-class was overloaded, and the many standing passengers had to be distributed more evenly throughout the carriages. The carriages were also running temperatures in the high 20s, so it was uncomfortably hot except in the vestibules.
As soon as Virgin's Ops team decided to put all of these passengers on to the LIV-EUS train at Crewe, it would have been very useful if there were some way to let passengers at subsequent stops (Stafford and Nuneaton, in this case) know that the train was already over-full and to take an alternative service if possible.
Nuneaton station monitors have sometimes displayed information to this effect, so I know it's possible to record and report it. Is there anywhere that this would be visible on the web before you get to the station?
In my own experience, which is mainly at weekends, trains being declassified and seat reservations being withdrawn, are all-too-frequent events. Not letting passengers further down the line know there is a problem just compounds the already miserable experience onboard when extra passengers try to pile on and arguments ensue over reserved seats.
Currently, some limited information on trains that will terminate early or skip stops is provided via Twitter, but it's by no means guaranteed, and it can be hard to find the pertinent tweets.
There's an opportunity here for some cross-TOC co-operation on providing detailed service updates via the web so that known near-future issues can be relayed.