The National Rail website for UK travel information is awful, truly awful. It’s badly designed to start with, and functionality is worse. Trying to find the times of trains on their website is a cumbersome business because of the way they have put this thing together.
It’s refreshing then to see other people putting together sites and applications which feed on the information available via nationalrail.co.uk but do a much better job on presentation, speed and ease of use. I have an iPhone, and have a couple of applications I use to look up train times, Trains and MyRail which has become my favourite. If you follow either of those links you’ll find that neither application is available any longer.
National Rail is incredibly protective about their data. I’m not sure why, it’s already in the public domain via their website. If they did a good enough job of providing the information in the first place then people wouldn’t feel the need to re-invent the wheel, but their service sucks and so people do.
Trains and MyRail are not the first or last to have been pulled due to National Rail asking for the service to be removed. My buddy Chris Roos setup a National Rail Twitter Service which he has now had to take down due to a request from National Rail, and other services will come and go.
Somehow, Matthew Somerville has been allowed to persist with traintimes.org.uk, a slimmed version of the main National Rail website. The horrid usability has been replicated but Matthew’s site does seem more responsive and has ‘bookmarkable URLs‘ which the main site does not. How Matthew has been allowed to continue where others have not is a bit of a mystery though. I should clear up now that I am not advocating the removal of Matthew’s service but rather a uniform application of policy and allowing everyone to access this publicly available data paid for by their customers.
The National Rail service also suffers from obvious scaling issues in times of high demand such as now when we have very bad weather. I’m in IT, and I understand that you do not normally scale a website to cope with absurd peaks just in case Stephen Fry mentions your site on Twitter. However, a service like this which a heck of a lot of people depend on should be able to cope with high demand – the operation of the country depends on it.