National Rail Enquiries Review

The national rail online service is pretty good for getting train times and info. But it isn’t great.

• Worst is sessions time out. So if I leave the browser open at train info over night and come back, and then click “later trains” or some such, the site will tell me I have timed out and will need to enter all the train details again. This is a bit of juvenile web development.
• Second worst is speed. The site is slow to load, and slow to get results.
• It is covered in stupid bugs. Many times I have loaded the front page, gone for tea, come back and tried to submit a query, only for it to come back saying, sorry you can’t request information about trains in the past. This is a rather silly design decision. They could easily assume I wanted current trains.
• Insufficient information in the results. I want lots and lots of information. Not just 5 trains. 50 is better. But I’d settle for 20.
• Did I mention it was slow?
• I want to be able to get complete timetables. I can’t, or at least can’t figure out how.

Steph also mentioned the fact that the site looks ugly and amateur, which I have to agree is true, but I don’t care much for. But I’m sure other people judge the site accordingly. I hope they don’t rectify this in future by increasing the download size, and thus slowing the site more.

Otherwise I like the service, it’s good enough, and beats ignorance.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 9:30 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.