Today I caught the new high speed service from Ramsgate to London St Pancras, and for the first time ever for a train journey to Lond0n for me, I actually got there faster than I could have done driving.

Train users elsewhere in the country will be used to this of course, it’s long been possible to get from London to Glasgow in just four and a half hours. The journey from Ramsgate to London Victoria however takes, at best, around one hour and fifty minutes. For 64 miles. to Charing Cross takes even longer. Today however, I was delighted with the journey time of one hour 15 minutes to take me to St Pancras.

So, I can now travel a few miles farther and do it around 35 minutes faster which is fantastic news. The price difference of just a couple of pounds extra was well worth the time saving for me, which today was essential to fit in with my timetable. The train was smart and comfortable too, and if I’d known there were power outlets next to each seat I would have taken my phone charger to get me through the day.

Of course I wasn’t travelling at peak times on a packed train so I can’t really say what the morning experience would be like on a normal weekday, but today there were minimal numbers of fellow travellers so the journey was probably the best train ride I’ve ever done.

So, based on my limited experience of the service, use it, it’s brilliant. Fact.

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.