Given the ongoing disruption caused by the quite amazing thunderstorm
in London (and elsewhere?) earlier on, perhaps now's a good time to
mention two 'Twitter' services provided by National Rail Enquiries and
also by the BBC London Travel unit.

'Twitter' is , as you will likely have heard, "all the rage" -
personally I'm just a little sceptical of the whole 'broadcast your
thoughts' thing it brings to the table, but maybe I just haven't seen
the light ('Twitterers' defend your honour!). But that's not the point
of this post - I just thought these two services might prove useful -
they provide 'very live' travel information in short messages of under
140 characters. You can get these messages sent to your mobile - and
in the case of NRE, you can just have TOC specific messages sent as
well.

You can do various fancy things that, to be honest, I haven't got my
head round, but you can just see all the recent messages on a simple
webpage without needing to sign up for anything - the relevant
webpages a

National Rail Enquiries:
http://twitter.com/nationalrailenq
[The 'Twitter profile' is @nationalrailenq]

BBC London Travel Alert [1]:
http://twitter.com/BBCTravelAlert
[The 'Twitter profile' is @BBCTravelAlert]

There's special webpages available for mobile phones too. Also on the
BBC London Travel Twitter page odd things go on, with various people
engaging in witty/dubious banter (delete to taste) - no, I don't quite
get the whole thing either, but I'm reliably told it's the future, at
least until the next thing comes along.

Point being, it's a way to tap into live info straight from mission
control. Or at least somewhere near mission control. (Though now I
think about it, I'm not too sure there actually is a mission
control...!)

National Rail provides a bit more information about it all here -
including how to get TOC specific information:
http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/passen...etworking.html
(where you can also find out how you can "Become a Fan of National
Rail Enquiries on Facebook!"... hmm...!)


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[1] The BBC Twitter page comes replete with a background of a scene
from the past... a number 73 Routemaster in the old Victoria bus
station shed. The whole background image can be seen below - I'm
wondering if the queue indicate it was taken on a Tube strike day...
see:
http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_prod...ackground2.jpg