National Rail's WAP site; excellent .. with a but

Standing in Euston Station I got out the Nokia N95 and flicked up National Rail enquiries wapsite, which, by the way, is helpfully linked on the T-Zones site.

The service is extremely, extremely efficient in telling you train times. A lot of thought has gone into making as few clicks as possible and displaying all salient information.

The only issue for me this morning was it didn’t give me the train journey status — to let me know what was screwed up where.

So I ended up having to do it analogue style, which is never a fun experience: I had to ‘ask’ a human. Who, it turns out, didn’t know where Darlington (my destination) was. She asked another human, who then unhelpfully explained to me that I needed to travel via King’s Cross.

I then had to arse about, ANALOGUE style, explaining to this second human, that I had come from King’s Cross — me and the other 1,000 people crowding the terminal — because the trains were screwed from there.

‘Connect at Liverpool then,’ was the very uninformed response from this information clerk. Font of all limited, almost helpful information.

I would have asked the clerk to do a lookup at the station information desk, but there was a 25+ person queue.

So I sat down in the middle of the concourse, whipped out the Apple, connected courtesy of The Cloud WiFi, visited the big National Rail site on Safari and in 40 seconds (including network load times) worked out that I could connect in Sheffield.

Ok, so the trains to Sheffield were packed. But I had the relevant information.

What a shame this whole thing isn’t quite mobilised yet.

By the way, if you’d like to chek out the National Rail WAP site from the comfort of your computer, click here — it’ll pre-load the wicked Wapsilon emulator and then load the National Rail site.