We’ve made some further changes to the website in response to your feedback.  Since our redesigned website went live late last year, we’ve experienced a few problems with our advertising and the way it appears, sometimes covering up text.  Obviously, this wasn’t sustainable, and I took the decision to bite the bullet and bring our advertising in house, rather than using an external supplier.

This will give NRE a lot more control over how we use advertising which will eliminate the issues I’ve highlighted on this blog previously.

My team has also implemented a new feature as part of our journey planner to allow you to choose to “include slower trains”.  By default, the journey planner is set to return the fastest journey results, however if you click this option, you will also be shown slower journeys that don’t require you to change trains.  If you don’t mind changing and just want to get there as quick as possible, just leave the box unticked.

Of course if you just want the cheapest possible ticket then you can use the Cheapest Fare Finder just below the main journey planner area.

We’ve launched an upgrade to our TrainTracker^TM Text system.  For those of you that don’t know, TrainTracker^TM Text is a real-time text based journey planning tool that allows you to get train times and train running information to your mobile phone.  All you have to do is send a text and the response will give you train times for your journey, their status: on time, delayed or cancelled and platform numbers (where available).

The changes we’ve introduced now allow you to reply to the message you’ve received saying “earlier” or “later”.  So if your journey to the station is going to get you in slightly earlier or later than you originally thought, you don’t have to type out the full journey query again.

For more details about how to plan your journey via TrainTracker^TM Text visit our website which includes step by step instructions and a handy simulator so that you can have a go!

And finally, a special mention for a very worthwhile cause.  One of my team, Duncan Henry recently completed the marathon in Mainz, Germany on behalf of the Railway Children.  The Railway Children has been working since 1993 to help street children around the world.  National Rail Enquiries is a keen supporter of the Railway Children who we raise funds for through events like the 3 Peaks by Rail.

This is Duncan’s first ever marathon and he admits it was much harder work than he realised, but he did excellently, smashing his target of 4 hours by a whopping 25 minutes.  So well done to him!  If you’d like to read more about Duncan’s exploits, or donate some money to the Railway Children, please visit his website.

Blog time again, April passed by in a whirr of activity, this month I’m going to be talking about:

• The Network Rail strike that wasn’t
• Ash-struck Britain
• Improvements to our homepage

During the end of March and into early April, my team spent a lot of time working with train companies to find out their plans for running trains if the planned strike by some Network Rail employees belonging to RMT and TSSA unions was to go ahead.  As can sometimes be the way, we’d put in a lot of effort to publicise what trains would be running only for the strike to be prevented by the High Court.

The team swung into action to quickly roll back the information in our systems to take out the strike timetables and revert to the week’s normal trains.  I’m pleased to say the team managed to do that quicker than we thought, and everything was back to normal within a couple of hours of the strike being called off!

We’d just gotten over that excitement when the UK was hit by the volcanic ash cloud, and all air travel to and from the UK was grounded.  National Rail Enquiries saw an increase in calls received of about 10%.  We deployed our normal contingencies to cope with increased demand and performed well.  Many of the questions we were asked mirrored the fact that people could not get into the UK by air, so heavily centred on European train travel and the availability of ferries.

The rail industry did its bit to help get passengers to where they needed to be with train companies running extra trains and putting on extra carriages to try to help people travel.

Looking forward to some improvements, over the past week or two we’ve made some changes to the site to respond to your feedback.  I’d received a number of comments about the site being slow and adverts hiding text.  The web team have been working hard to resolve these issues and a number of things have changed which should speed the site up, and help you find your information quicker and easier.

One of the major changes is to our Live Departure Boards.  There’ve been a number of suggestions / comments and complaints.  Changes have been made to the design to make it more in keeping with the rest of the website, as well as fixing the problems with checking arrivals.  Why not have a look and let me know what you think?

And finally, I’ve enabled comments on this blog – at first they’re going to be moderated whilst I get a feel for the type of response I’m going to get.  But I hope that it helps to show that I want to engage in a conversation with you – tell me what you like and what we can do better!

Hello everyone, I hope that you are all enjoying what appears to be the first signs of Spring in the air.  I think we’d all forgotten what sunshine looked like!  In this month’s blog I’m going to be talking about:

• The benefits of registering
• Network Rail’s potential strike

I’ve also had some feedback asking why we don’t have certain functionality, which we do – you just have to register to use it!  Since our new website went live, we’ve seen an increase in 141% in the number of registered users that we have, so I thought it might be worthwhile running through some of the benefits of registering.

When you register, the first thing you do is tell us your Home station and your Work station – this is so that we can tailor what we show you, according to what time of day it is.  The next step is to tell us some information about you, your name, email address etc..

Once you’ve registered, you’ll see a different homepage – in place of the Travel Centre, you’ll see a Live Departure Board for your home and work stations.  If you’re looking in the morning, you’ll see a departure board for home to work.  If you’re looking in the afternoon, you’ll see departures for your journey home.  Our aim is that you find what you need without having to search for it.

You may also have noticed a change tothe Find my train times and fares box at the top of the page.  My journeys holds information about journeys you’ve planned recently, or journeys you’ve chosen to save.  The recent journeys are automatically stored by the system, but you can choose which journeys you want to save by clicking on Save Journey once you’ve got your train times.

Why don’t you register now to take advantage of these features?

It’s been hard to avoid in the news the fact that some Network Rail staff belonging to the RMT and TSSA unions have voted in favour of strike action.  My team spent the last week of March working on getting the information into our systems to enable you to plan your journeys.  Following the high court suspending the action, we were able to get our systems back up to date showing the original planned timetable.

We’ll keep watching over the next few weeks to see whether the unions are able to resolve their dispute with Network Rail without industrial action.  As and when we have any further information, we’ll make it available on our website.

A foray into Facebook and other things…

I hope everyone is keeping well.

The month of February has been another busy one for me and my team.  In this month’s blog, I’m going to be talking about a few things:

• Our first Facebook app
• The latest release of our website
• Feedback from you
• Updates to TrainTracker
• Some good news!

This month we launched our first Facebook application – Visit a Friend which allows you to plan journeys to your friends and events.  In order for the journey to work, you’ll need to ensure that you have a location in your profile, and that the person/event you’re visiting does too.   Why don’t you have a go and plan some journeys – let us know via the “Contact” link at the bottom of the app if you’ve got any issues.

Thanks for your emails since the last blog. I’ve also had quite a bit of feedback about adverts covering our content.  We’ve just released our latest set of website updates which resolves the majority of these problems.   This release has also included improvements to the station information pages – we’re now showing all of the information we hold about each of the country’s stations.  We’re still without the new bus maps as we’re waiting for updated versions from our supplier.

I’ve received comments about the Rangers and Rovers information being unavailable.  I’d like to apologise about that – we’ve made some changes now and the A-Z is now fully populated and the maps are there showing each ticket’s validity area.

I’ve even had a couple of emails complaining that there isn’t a feedback form on the site: I love feedback so I can assure you that there has always been and there still is a feedback form, just click on Contact Us which is at the bottom of every page (as shown in the picture above).

There have also been some improvements made to TrainTracker^TM to improve our information during disruption – these changes mean that if your journey is disrupted the service will let you know straight away.  TrainTracker^TM uses speech recognition which lets you say what you want.  It then looks up train times from our Live Departure and Arrivals Boards and our real time journey planner and speaks this information to you.  If you haven’t used it before, why not give it a go?

To close with some good news – I’m really pleased our Stations Made Easy tool has been recognised by the National Cycle Rail Awards for the Most Innovative Approach to Rail Cycle Integration.  Stations Made Easy was launched recently to allow you to plan your journeys around a station for example from a particular entrance to the platform your train departs from.  If you had difficulty with steps, our Stations Made Easy can advise you of routes which avoid steps, or which have ramps.  It also contains over 1.5million pictures of stations, which will help you find your way at an unfamiliar station.

As before, send your feedback through to me at nreblog@atoc.org.

New Year / New Blog

First of all – let me start by explaining the change in format in the blog.  We got a number of responses to the first blog saying that you wanted to know who was writing it.  So here you are, it’s me – that’s why it’s now a chief exec’s blog and you get to see my picture in the top right!  Another request that we got was to have comments enabled: I want to continue receiving your feedback through as email comments for now, whilst I get a feel for what sort and volume of response I can expect.  But, fear not, I shall respond to the feedback we receive from this blog next time.

I hope that you had a good Christmas and New Year, although that may seem a distant memory.  For National Rail Enquiries, much of the last few weeks have been spent on the new website’s implementation.

New Website Feedback

There’s been a variety of feedback, both positive and negative regarding the look and feel of the new website, and I want to take the opportunity to share some of what we’ve received with you, and also respond to some of the criticism.

The team is really pleased with the feedback from various sources within the web industry, including Andy Kinsey, who singled out our redesign for special mention in his feature Top 10 Redesigns of 2009.  We’re still working through some teething problems with the site – there have been a number of comments, both direct to us, and on various websites highlighting problems with the placement of adverts and live departure board arrivals functionality.  The team has already made a number of changes to resolve some of these issues and will continue to do so.  I’m really proud of the new website, and want it to be a success, so please let me know what problems you’re having so I can direct my team to get them resolved.

Recent Bad Weather

Our services have experienced extreme levels of demand on most days since the snow affected the southern part of the country on 18th December, up until 13th January, and I want to let you know about how NRE performed during this time.

The information we provided

Our Information Team and the National Rail Communication Centre were in constant dialogue with the Train Operating Companies and Network Rail Control Centres throughout the period of bad weather. Having direct communication enables us to provide up-to-date information to passengers very quickly.

I feel the quality of information overall was better than in previous bad weather incidents, but I realise there were some periods when the information in some areas was simply not good enough.  The Passenger Information Strategy Group (a cross-industry group with a focus on improving passenger information) is conducting its review of the industry-wide provision of information to passengers during this incident.  This will result in recommendations for the rail industry to adopt to improve information in the future.

Our contact centres

Calls to our contact centres were significantly higher than normal: at times we were experiencing demand of 450% above forecasted call volumes.  In order to provide information more quickly, and to save people waiting in a queue, my team put live an information “hotline” at 0600 on 6^th January. This played recorded information describing the situation for each Train Operating Company. The messages were kept up to date 24/7 by our National Rail Communication Centre. The hotline answered around 60,000 calls per day on 6th, 7th and 8th January and enabled the contact centres to concentrate on specific journey enquiries as opposed to generic disruption information requests.

The website

Our website recorded its highest ever usage in terms of requests per hour (113,000), live departure board enquiries (349,000 per day) and journey plans returned (2.4 million per day).

In accordance with our internal procedures we made the decision to use a ‘lite’ page throughout the period of bad weather to ensure optimum performance.  All our information was available, however we removed the adverts in order to maximise the website’s efficiency. However, I’ll admit – we did experience some issues with the site between 13:00 – 15:30 on 5th January.  This was disappointing, as we’ve spent a lot of time and effort to make the website resilient following last year’s heavy snowfall.  However – a change to the site caused an error, which resulted in brief periods of the service not being available and some slow running.  On 6th January the site ran slowly at times because of configuration issues; tuning was applied and performance has been good since. On 7th January a road works team caused us a bit of a headache when they accidentally cut through a telecommunications cable to our data centre! This resulted in some of our real time services (Live Departure Boards / Real Time Journey Planner) being unavailable for a few hours.

Fingers crossed, the worst of the weather is behind us, so we have moved back to the full version of our website and I’m looking forward to the rest of the challenges this New Year can throw us.  As before, please email in your comments to nreblog@atoc.org.

Welcome to our first blog!

With the increased growth in social media, we thought it was about time we got involved.  We’re hoping to use this facility to let you know new things National Rail Enquiries is getting involved with as well as to respond to comments made about National Rail Enquiries in the blogosphere.

New Look Website

One of the big things the team’s been working on this year is a major upgrade to our website.  We thought it was about time that the website was brought up-to-date, the old design had been around for the last five years – and it looked it.  By talking to customers, and incorporating feedback we think that we’ve come up with a design that will make the website much easier to use.

If you’re already a subscriber, you’re ahead of the game.  When you log in to www.nationalrail.co.uk you’ll see that we’ve made your saved journeys and preferences much more accessible: rather than delving into the “my account” section, the bits that you want to see are up front.   As you plan your journeys, the site will remember what you’ve looked for making planning the same journey even quicker next time.  Next time you return to the site, you won’t have to log in again (unless you choose not to remain logged in) making journey planning even quicker.  If you haven’t signed up yet, click here to register and set up your favourites.

We’ve received a lot of feedback in the past that customers have found sometimes it difficult to find the cheapest tickets for their journeys.  We’ve spent a lot of time working on our Cheapest Fare Finder tool to make it more intuitive, so have a go and let us know what you think!

Our Contact Centres

There’s been big change within our Contact Centres in the last few months: all National Rail Enquiries calls, emails, customer service and calls from Help Points are now answered by our partner of over 5 years Intelenet Global Services, in Mumbai and Delhi. All National Rail Enquiries Contact Centres are regulated and assessed using a variety of methods, including mystery shopping to assess accuracy and large-scale customer surveys to assess customer satisfaction. With similar scores being given by our customers for both or UK and India operations we decided to reduce costs without compromising on the quality of service to our customers.

We recently received an award in the Top 50 Contact Centres and featured in The Times as part of a Customer Service supplement.

Real Time Information

There’s been quite a bit of speculation on the internet regarding the Office of Rail Regulation’s investigation into the licencing of data feeds from Darwin, our real time train information system.  To set the story straight, the ORR have recently determined that we have not breached competition rules in the licencing of our services.  They have validated our existing licencing process, decision criteria and pricing model and we’ve agreed to publish a Code of Practice for the issuance of future licences.   We currently have licences granted with 17 external companies for the provision of our real time data, and we’re having active discussions with a further 20.

Going Forward

We’re going to update this blog on a monthly basis.  But as we said at the start, we’re new to this game, so if you’ve got any suggestions or comments please email them through to us at nreblog@atoc.org.