Apps aren’t that smart

Unfortunately, railway managers are invariably smartphone owners who can access apps. They forget that a fair proportion of the population don’t have them (they aren’t cheap) and that more don’t use their smartphones fully. This discourages anyone who lacks smartphone access from railway information.

Despite Peter Conway’s fondness for apps to access timetables (Open Access, RAIL 952), I much prefer a printed timetable to anything available online.

At lovely Poppleton, Northern plastered the station with 11 large posters, printed on plastic, extolling the virtues of its app. They even claim that it helps save the planet - a questionable claim given the quantity of plastic used in posters and the energy used in accessing smartphone apps.

Of course, there are no timetable posters, except the train times displayed by the Community Railway Nursery. Instead, Northern puts up posters telling us train times will change in May - hardly helpful. Yet it has dismally failed to repair the display screens, now out of action for months.

Barry Doe is right. We should have paper timetables. The railways need all the passengers they can get and making railways easy to use for everyone is vital.

Roger Backhouse, York