Welcome to the New Year, I hope you all thoroughly enjoyed the festive break and managed to have a great time with family and friends. 2011 was such a busy year for us with all our new products and services rolling out it just flew past. However, looking forward it is difficult not to get excited about this year with the London 2012 Games, European Football Championships and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee just around the corner!
In my last blog I talked about the new mobile website that launched late last year and I would like to let you all know it has been a huge success so far with 3 million views of the site last month alone! We have been receiving a large amount of feedback, most of which has been very positive and I thank you all for that. We are delighted when we hear that your journeys have been made easier through the use of our service.
Besides all the good news, there is one issue we noticed in the feedback that we are currently working to rectify. Many mobile users have asked that there be an option to switch between the mobile site and full site when visiting nationalrail.co.uk on their mobile phones. This is currently not possible, however we have been talking with our suppliers and we hope to have this additional feature added in the near future (I will keep you posted).
Now, we are not stopping there, the ball keeps rolling in 2012 and we have been busy with many new projects. One being the refresh of our YouTube channel. With the help of YouTube, we have the goal of building a bank of useful video guides and product information that everyone can easily access.
Our newest addition to the YouTube channel is a video tutorial showing how to set up alerts on the National Rail Enquiries website. This video was created by someone in my team and demonstrates how easy it is to receive train delays and cancellations via email, text message and Twitter. The best thing is email and Twitter alerts are completely free and if you want, text message alerts can be sent with a small fee being charged by your mobile provider. So don’t get caught out during the winter months and sign up to alerts on our website!
Finally, I would like to wish you all the best for the remaining winter months and a prosperous New Year to you and your families.
As promised in my blog earlier in the month – our new look mobile site has been launched today! On your mobile phone, simply browse to http://m.nationalrail.co.uk and you’ll see the new look site.
It’s especially designed to get you the information you need quickly & easily – just what you need when you’re on the move.
What’s new?
Disruption information is now easier to find, a red warning triangle on the front of the website shows when there’s major disruption, and all other travel news & engineering work is listed within the Changes to train times section.
The mobile site contains the live train running information for all trains on the UK network – why not test it out when you’re on your journey home tonight? Plan your journey or use the live departure boards to find out whether your train is running on time. You can monitor your train’s progress using the live arrivals board for your destination station, just find your train & click on it to see information about scheduled vs actual arrival times at each station on your route.
For the first time the site includes the station picker drop down list – all you need to do is start typing the name of the station (or its 3 letter code) and you’ll be returned a list of stations which matches what you’ve typed.
Also new to the mobile site is our station information section, where you can find all the great information about the facilities at each station from car parking to refreshments.
Let us know what you think about the new site through our Facebook page, or through Twitter.
Two more things – with winter fast approaching, we’ve compiled a handy list of tools you can use to get information about disruption. Why not get yourself set up now to avoid being left out in the cold?
And finally – Christmas is fast approaching, check out our dedicated Christmas page to make sure you’re not caught out!
• Getting ready for winter
• Responding to your feedback
• Sneak preview of the new mobile site!
One of the problems we had last winter was where temporary timetables were introduced by the train companies, we were unable to display those trains within the journey planner – which mean we had to direct passengers to use the live departure boards. This led to confusion as to which trains were running and which weren’t which wasn’t satisfactory.
Last month, we introduced a change to allow us to show these temporary timetable changes within the journey planner, so that should the railway experience similar problems this winter, we’ll be prepared. We’ll highlight these changes to you with a blue i (information) icon in a triangle within the status column of the train times & fares page.
One other piece of work that we’ve been involved with is improving the information given during disruption. When there are problems on a particular line, customers are often given advice that “tickets are being accepted by…” another train company. You may or may not know what that means in practicality – what station do you have to go to, where will it get you. In order to help with that, the industry has devised a set of alternative route maps, to be given out on station and publicised on websites when there is major disruption on a particular route. For example, the image to the right shows the alternative routes if there is a problem on the Chiltern Railways route between London and Birmingham.
You may have noticed that we’ve introduced a survey programme onto the website. The survey pops up and you can choose whether you want to participate or not, if you choose no we won’t bother you again on that computer. If you say yes, then at the end of your visit to the website, we’ll ask you some questions about your visit.
This type of tool is really important to NRE as it tells us how good we are, and gives us pointers as to what needs improving. One of the consistent issues raised is how to add returns or railcards to a journey. Whilst we work on improving the usability of this part of the site in the long term, I thought it might be helpful to produce a little video about journey planning. This will hopefully help in the meantime! Any other suggestions you might have for mini videos, please comment on the blog.
One major change we do have coming is that at the end November, we’ll be introducing a redesigned mobile version of the website. Any of you that have used the mobile version in the last few months will have seen that it needs to be brought up to date. As more and more of you are accessing the website via mobile devices, we thought that it was important to improve it.
The new website will allow mobile users to have much better access to disruption and station information, along with your usual favourites of journey planning and live departure boards. I’ll write more when we launch the mobile site at end November!
• Including slower trains with fewer changes where that’s cheaper
• Adding fares to the train times page
Phew! Another busy month – if you’ve been on our website today, you may have noticed some changes. As a response to passenger feedback and requests, we’ve introduced the ability to plan a journey to or from stations near a postcode.
In the Journey Planner in either the From or To boxes, simply type in the postcode you wish to use, fill in the other From or To box with your origin or destination as appropriate, tell us when you’d like to travel, and if you want a return journey.
The system will give you a selection of stations that are near to the postcode that you’ve put in – more detail about that is available on the postcode page here. The results page will tell you how far the station is from your postcode, along with the cheapest ticket price for the times you’ve chosen to travel and the quickest available journey. Get planning now and let us know what you think here.
What’s more, the eagle-eyed amongst you may have seen that a tick box that used to say “include slower trains” now says “show fastest trains only”. What this means is that whereas before we would have filtered out journeys that may have been direct, but were slower than others, now we’ll include more journey opportunities so that you can be in control. The idea here is that some journeys that may take longer, but require less changes and are cheaper will show up. For example, a journey from London to Birmingham will now pick up journey opportunities via London Euston to Birmingham New Street with Virgin Trains, London Euston to Birmingham New Street with London Midland and London Marylebone to Birmingham Moor Street/Snow Hill with Chiltern Railways.
One of the other major changes that has been made is adding fares to the train times page. This redesigned page shows information about the journey: how many changes / if it’s on time / whether it includes a bus – alongside information about ticket prices. We’ve shortened the number of clicks it takes you before your journey details are passed on to a ticket seller so that you get the information you need quicker.
We’ve also changed the way that the website highlights the cheapest fare to make it more obvious.
We’ve got a record number of developers creating applications for a host of mobile devices at the moment. We have granted 70 licences to 3rd party developers of which 30 are for mobile apps on the market or in development. Our real time information allows you to find out if a train is running on time, delayed on route or cancelled. You can get information about which apps use our licenced info on our Travel Tools page.
NRE were part of Microsoft’s annual Hack Day where over 200 developers were allowed access to our live departure information feed to see who could develop the best application. There were some great apps developed and we’re looking forward to granting some licence applications. Any developers out there that would like to use our info can apply for a licence here.
Some months ago I wrote to tell you that our journey planner can now plan journeys to London Underground Zone 1 and all Docklands Light Railway stations. You simply type the name of the station you want to travel to or from into the journey planner, and we’ll plan your journey for you – including the walking time it takes to get from the railway station to the underground station where necessary.
What you might not have known, is that our website can also give you travel updates for the London Underground both happening at the moment, and for the coming weekend. All you have to do is visit our Tube Service Updates page.
If you want to travel outside of zone 1, or you need to check your route, you can take a look at the interactive map which allows you to search for a particular station.
If you make a journey regularly, or have a flexible ticket why not print your own timetable? Our Pocket Timetable tool gives you the flexibility to create a timetable that is tailored to your own individual journey. You tell us where you’re starting and ending your journey, and when you want to travel. We’ll then give you a custom timetable which you can save as a PDF for use on your computer or smartphone, or print it out to take with you!
Finally – a little sneak preview – at the end of next month, we’re going to be making changes to the journey planner which will allow you to plan your journey to or from a postcode. The journey planner will then give you various options of the nearest local and main stations for you to make your journey.
I’ll let you know first when the upgrade goes live!
I hope that everyone had a good Easter and Royal Wedding bank holiday break. During the week between Easter and the Royal Wedding, we launched a major update to the website.
Those of you that use the website regularly may already have noticed one of the changes, on the homepage, you’ll see a new “Passengers” icon within the journey planner. This is because, if you’re planning a journey more than 48 hours in advance, we’ll direct you straight to the fares information. If you’re planning a journey for more than one passenger, or want to use a railcard, or travel first class, you can click on the Passengers icon to get access to these features:
Once you’ve made the changes you need – or if you’re happy with a single passenger clicking on Go, will take you directly to your fares and journey information.
Free Journey Alerts
We’ve built on our Alert Me, SMS alerting services for delays to journeys to expand it to allow distribution of messages by Email and now by Twitter too for registered users. If you’re not registered with our website, you can register here. Once you’ve registered, or if you’re already signed into the website, you can sign up for Email or Twitter alerts via any journey plan, or via the Alert Me journey planner. Then once you’ve planned the journeys you want to be alerted on, just tick the Email or Twitter checkboxes! You can sign up with Twitter via their website, follow us, and we’ll send you Direct Messages about disruption to the journey(s) you’ve planned. You can even choose to receive notifications from Twitter about Direct Message via SMS to your phone – information about this, and any charges are available from Twitter. As with the normal SMS service, you can choose whether you receive the alerts once, on weekdays, or for up to 12 weeks – you can do this via the “Configure Alerts” section of the Alert Me journey planner.
Sharing Journey Links
Finally, I’m pleased to announce that the format of the web address for our journey planning pages. In Plain English, this means that the journey planner uses explicit dates and stations – rather than a random code, so you can share journey plans with your friends or colleagues. It’s also useful if you want to bookmark a page for your journey to or from a station. For example, if you regularly travel from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly, in the evening, you can bookmark:
Try planning a journey and see it for yourself in your browser’s address bar.
As always, I’m keen to hear your feedback – which you can provide to me via the website.
Wow, what a busy couple of months we’ve had. Lots to update you on:
Updates to the website
Our response to the latest Which report
NRE are award winners!
So far this year we have released an update to the website – this includes further enhancements as part of our Speed Programme which continues to address some of the issues brought up by you since the redesign launched.
More excitingly, we’ve been working with Microsoft to design a new page for Internet Explorer version 9 – Windows users can download IE9 from here and our IE9 page is here.
You may have seen National Rail Enquiries in the news recently following the publication of a report by Which that had asked some questions of our contact centres and also rail staff in ticket offices. We believe that the report is seriously misleading and misrepresentative. Asking 75 questions on obscure scenarios cannot come close to giving a representative view of the 250 million enquiries that are made to us every year. The researchers haven’t actually asked for the cheapest ticket in all the scenarios and even where they have done, they have explicitly excluded the cheapest fares.
Finally, I am very proud that we were judged Rail Business of the Year a few weeks ago at the Rail Business Awards, as well as winning the Supplier Excellence category. We entered our Real Time Journey Planning systems – a world first which is delivering real benefits to you the travelling public.
It’s an honour to win the Rail Business of the Year award. We have a fantastic team that works tirelessly to provide millions of people with helpful, relevant and up-to-date information 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But we’re not complacent. The challenge now will be to continue to adapt and to ensure that we are able to provide passengers and the rest of the sector with the service that they expect and deserve. The way that people access information is changing rapidly, in particular as smartphones become more and more commonplace. Just like any other business, we will need to continue evolving so that we can keep pace with customers’ changing expectations.
You can read more about the awards and who won what on the Rail Professional website here.
Apologies for the length between blogs, things have rather been overtaken with the poor weather. In this blog, I’m going to tell you about:
Impact of the poor weather on NRE
Our new National service indicator
Rereleased Windows gadget
The snow in early December had a huge impact on demand for our services.
On Thursday 2nd December the website received 2 million visits, which is 50% higher than the previous high from back in January. Our real time journey planner handled 2-3 times the number of enquiries that it did before which shows that more of you are relying on it than previously. My contact centre team implemented the recorded information hotline that was successful in January, and this answered 28,000 calls on the Thursday alone. This year the increased take up of our Twitter and Facebook disruption accounts enabled us to proactively send over 1 million free messages to our fans and followers.
Probably the most visible change you may have noticed in recent weeks is our new service indicator. Available to view at www.nationalrail.co.uk/disruption it gives an overview of how each train operating company is running, with information about whether there are delays. Where there are delays, you can click through to get specific information for that disruption. As more poor weather is forecast for the end of this week I’d like to encourage you to check your journeys on our website prior to travel. For information on the move, I’d recommend using one of the tools explained on our travel tools page.
We’ve also launched an upgraded version of the Windows gadget. The gadget which can be used on PCs that have the Windows Vista or 7 operating systems displays live departure boards for your chosen station(s). You can download the latest version from here.
In the last couple of weeks, NRE have introduced a new service on Facebook to keep passengers informed about disruption to train services. We’ve been posting out information via Twitter for the last year and have approaching 20,000 followers across all of our accounts, but now we’re sending out the information via Facebook too.
One of our objectives is to ensure that people have the information at their finger tips to make choices about their travel plans. Whilst finding out about disruption to trains may not be the most exciting of your Facebook status updates, we hope that you will find the information useful.
If you’ve got any comments or suggestions about other ideas for new ways we can disseminate our information, please start a discussion on our Facebook page and one of my staff will get back to you.
In other news, wish us a happy birthday – our online journey planner recently celebrated its 4th birthday! It now handles an average of 1.6 million journey planning requests each day, and has delivered 1.5 billion since we launched it in 2006. The latest phase of its development (to include journey planning from National Rail to DLR stations) goes live at the end of the month.
As I promised in my last blog, we’ve now launched another upgrade to our website which includes:
Journey planning between London Underground zone 1 and National Rail stations
Improvements to the speed of the website
Changes to the station information pages
You can now plan journeys to or from London Underground Zone 1 stations. Simply type the name of your station in, and you’ll see the underground icon next to the station name as in this picture.
If you then click on the journey details we’ll even tell you which underground line(s) you need to catch. We also provide a link to our tube service updates page which shows whether there are any delays on London Underground lines.
This upgrade has also seen the first tranche of our Speed programme, the goal of which is to improve website responsiveness. These changes have seen an improvement of up to 60% for those who are using Internet Explorer version 6. Research has shown that those using IE6 have been most affected by speed issues. There are further tranches of the Speed programme planned over the next few months that will tackle other areas to increase the website’s speed.
As part of this upgrade we’ve also reinstated a number of station information fields which had become lost as part of our redesign. Feedback from you has shown that you’ve found it difficult to find the station information, so we’ve also renamed the ‘About your journey’ section to ‘Stations & on train’ which is hopefully less ambiguous.
I'm Chris Scoggins, the Chief Executive of National Rail Enquiries – a privately-owned company that runs one of the UK’s top websites and one of the busiest telephone services.
