On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 22:27:11 +0000 (UTC), "Peter Masson"
wrote:
[...]
As was to be expected, though, a collapse of the service for a reason
outside the control of the railways was accompanied by a collapse of
information. The Connex website even managed to proclaim 'no major
problems'.

TfL's site earlier helpfully said that there was no travel information
because of the power cut. If they were able to upload a specific
message to the site, why wasn't anything useful posted? Shouldn't
they have someone on call to do things like this? Now they are
telling us to ask at a local station as most services are "affected".
A list of lines that have service, and a plea not to travel at all
would be more useful. I'm sure everyone on the ground is doing their
bit, but where's the coordination?

And as for the other train companies... Connex are still "running
well", though their train running pages are quite helpful. SWT's news
about the delays is two clicks away from the home page and should IMHO
be much more prominent. c2c useless. SouthCentral useless.
Silverlink - gave up. Of the TOC sites I looked at, only WAGN have
news about the power cut on their first page. National Rail has a
very nice obvious link to the current disruptions page, however once
you get to the page, the information about tonight's delays has gone!

Even though most people affected won't be in front of a web browser,
it depresses me how little use was made of the medium by the
operators.

Richard.