Does anyone know of a good website or email service that can give details of
all weekend rail engineering works in the old London & South East area? The
information available at stations is bad enough for its own TOC, let alone
anything else, and I got badly caught out today with National Express, FCC
and SWT all having works.

On Apr 10, 10:31*pm, "Tim Roll-Pickering" T.C.Roll-
wrote:
Does anyone know of a good website or email service that can give details of
all weekend rail engineering works in the old London & South East area? The
information available at stations is bad enough for its own TOC, let alone
anything else, and I got badly caught out today with National Express, FCC
and SWT all having works.

Not as such, no. However the Rail section of the TfL website's 'Live
Travel News' might be sort of what you're looking for - it has
sections for 'Today', 'This weekend' and 'Planned works' (London
Overground is at the top of the list, however scroll down for "Other
London rail operators" to see info for each London TOC) :
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/livetravelnews/realtime/rail/default.html

It's not a resource I've used that much when it comes to mainline rail
services, as I normally turn to the TOC websites. However it does look
as though it gives a broad outline with regards to planned works - I'm
looking at the entry for Good Friday (which will shortly disappear)
and it seems pretty comprehensive, as does the weekend entry. I can
imagine that the longer term planned works page might be a bit patchy,
and I dare say it's not the place to turn to for so-called 'real time'
news on disruptions.

Each entry has a link to "find out more information", which leads to a
further page with more details. It is actually a pretty good effort I
reckon, and I approve of the concept of a central place where all such
information is collated, so in the future I'm going to make it my
first port of call for weekend rail service info and see how well it
does.

It is of course for London only though - so no news about what's
happening down on the south coast or wherever.

Another source of collated information is the National Rail website -
they have a single page (that can be mega-long) that details all
''Current Service Disruptions'. IIRC this is how the 'Planned
Engineering Works' page used to look too, but now it has a calendar
function and also a TOC filter so it's somewhat less bamboozling than
it used to be. See:
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/service_disruptions/

Also, all the south-east TOCs plus others offer a service called
'JourneyCheck', which is made available on the web, and for many TOCs
it's also made available on mobile devices with special WAP and/or PDA
versions. See this page to see which TOC offers what:
http://www.jcheck.com/error/invalidTOC

Lastly I find the Live Departure Board service via the National Rail
website very useful on my mobile - I use the ultra cut-down WAP
version at http://wap.nationalrail.co.uk and bookmark pages as
appropriate, e.g. I've a bookmark to skip right to the station entry
screen for the LDBs. Fancier versions of the National Rail site can of
course be summoned up by entering the normal website URL http://
www.nationalrail.co.uk, but I like to keep it simple because I'm a
simple minded kinda guy.

Hope that might be of some help. I quite agree that the information
provided is often pretty duff, with little real consideration for how
it reads - it often assumes a degree of knowledge about the network
that irregular or less frequent weekend users in particular are likely
not to equipped with. I'm always on favour of trying to graphically
illustrate stuff like this as I think it can be of a great help in
communicating complex information.

"Tim Roll-Pickering" wrote
Does anyone know of a good website or email service that can give details
of all weekend rail engineering works in the old London & South East area?
The information available at stations is bad enough for its own TOC, let
alone anything else, and I got badly caught out today with National
Express, FCC and SWT all having works.

http://www.gensheet.co.uk/toclinks.html attempts to give links to all TOC
engineering pages. This is an unofficial enthusiast site and the links are
sometimes broken, but nevertheless I find it the best way to access all the
available information.