Fare Dealer RAIL fares expert Barry Doe is frustrated at the lack of information on LNER’s website.
IN RAIL 902’s The Fare Dealer, I concentrated on the need for passengers to be kept more up-to-date with changes. I also complained that Journey Planners are being used more and more as an excuse not to show information in full.
I regret that this has deteriorated further in the past two weeks. I think also there is now ‘overkill’ in the way the information for the Coronavirus emergency timetables is being shown on the National Rail website.
Firstly, the normal service disruption and timetable changes page at www.nationalrail.co.uk/ service_disruptions/today.aspx has 25 entries covering all operators, including London Underground and TfL Rail.
Unhelpfully, the list is in a random order, so you have to scroll down to find the one you want. Every entry then starts with an identical statement about the rail industry working to support efforts to delay the spread of Coronavirus and to keep services running for key workers. It then adds a note saying only essential travel is permitted.
In addition, there is a single entry, ‘Coronavirus - latest travel advice’, which does list operators in alphabetical order. It repeats the entire rubric as above about the reasons for avoiding travel. Clicking any operator in the list also opens the relevant page for each of the other 25 entries listed.
So, in fact it would be far less confusing if just that single entry were shown and the other 25 were omitted. Or, rather, for the past week it would have been, had it not been for the fact that the single file omitted all the Govia Thameslink Railway group and Southeastern (although that has now been fixed).
Returning to the individual operators, each entry eventually allows you to see the most important thing - the reduced timetable - by way of the sentence: “The revised timetable and additional details can be found here” (with ‘here’ showing a hyperlink to the relevant information).
So, for Avanti West Coast it takes you to three coloured panels for the Mon-Fri, Sat and Sun timetables. Clicking immediately downloads the full timetable. Full marks to Avanti for its clarity and concise information, and most operators do something similar.
However, LNER comes in for huge criticism for the way it handles the information. Clicking ‘here’ takes you to a
panel marked ‘Timetable Changes’ which simply shows a box marked ‘Journey Planner’.
I spent half an hour trawling all sections of the site to see if I could find what most people want - a timetable! I clicked a box marked King’s Cross to Edinburgh and it told me the first train and the last train, adding there were ‘approximately’ eight trains a day. Then it told me the distance between the two is 331 miles, which is totally irrelevant as that’s as the crow flies and not the 393 miles of the rail route.
I eventually found a timetable section and (at last) a timetable to download. I did - and found it was the now-defunct December to May timetable. There was nothing to say it was not in use.
Finally, I found a disruptions page and it said “services are running normally”, from which one has to guess (you have to guess most things on the LNER site) that this means normally against the secret timetable LNER is currently operating, yet refuses to show.
It’s the worst example of an operator website I have ever seen, and a web (excuse the pun) of misleading ambiguous information.
I have received lots of complaints from readers about LNER’s poor information in recent months. In mid-February, for example, posters appeared all over its network saying users should not travel to/from London on
February 29 and March 1 owing to engineering work. There was no mention of the fact that many could have travelled via Sheffield to St Pancras or even via Peterborough and Ely into Liverpool Street.
I have often told people who enthuse about LNER being ‘nationalised’ that being run by the Department for Transport’s Operator of Last Resort is not remotely like being part of British Rail (BR) - and the above proves my point.
BR managers would never have allowed such a hideous approach to information when it ran InterCity East Coast. Come to that, neither would GNER.