Great Western Coffee Shop

I will be blogging and tweeting from this Summit next week - www.transforming-passenger-information.com

Feedback on points to raise very welcome!

Peter

@birm2lond

http://birmingham2london.blogspot.co.uk

Please post up some report here too, Peter, and we'll be very happy to provide feedback - we're happy for you to mention your own blog from time to time, but please don't use the Coffee Shop just to advertise it  ;) ... we all tend to be very busy, and it's a real help to us to be able to get key headlines and summaries without having to visit everyone's separate page!

Grahame - point taken and happy to oblige!

Clearly the most relevant topic at the Conference for Forum members was Darwin, not least because Matt Bromley (Station Manager Marylebone) spoke enthusiastically about the 'quick win' that the system had given Chiltern Railways. I see that Darwin has mentions elsewhere so, briefly, it is a single national database with a single prediction engine that is being put in place to feed the 2000 Customer Information System screens at stations and to feed other CIS sources such as web sites. The lead organisation for it is National Rail Enquiries.

Matt highlighted two gains for Chiltern: a single source of information now offers 87 delay reasons rather than the previous 5, and Chiltern CIS screens now reflect the national 'live' situation. This is a particular benefit in relation to CrossCountry delays - previously, Chiltern had been 'blind' to delays south of Oxford.

Ketech has issued a press release on the work (http://www.ketech.com/index.php/media-centre/our-news/latest-news/post/2012/12/19/first-networked-cis-darwin-interface) whilst Tom Cairns has blogged on the open data implications of Darwin (http://thomas-cairns.co.uk/2013/02/orr-real-time-train-information-consultation/)

Also of direct interest to Forum members would be the related presentations by Anthony Smith and Guy Dangerfield of Passenger Focus on the actual Customer Experience that was driving the need to transform Passenger Information. Clearly the twice-yearly National Passenger Survey is pivotal in informing TOCs of the concerns of their passengers and it would seem from the TOC speakers is taken seriously...

The two PF speakers wanted consistent timely information, especially during disruptions; joined-up systems that allowed the passenger to find out the same information from a variety of sources; the use of plain English rather than 'railway speak'; staff who treated passengers as 'human beings'; and the TOCs to be pro-active rather than reactive.

Elsewhere in the programme, LondonMidland spoke on the success of using Twitter (and some of the pitfalls) whilst East Midlands Trains presented on the importance of staff involvement and training. Among the international presentations was one by Deutsche Bahn on an integrated Android App which is being rolled out in Germany to provide real-time information to both staff and passengers. Interestingly a key challenge has been to find developers with the requisite HTML5 and Android app skills!

Thanks for posting this, birm, I found it most interesting.  I note that railway staff are encouraged to treat passengers as human beings, which of course is excellent advice and nearly always happens in my experience.  However, having watched the way some passengers treat staff on the recent BBC documentary, there should be large print posters telling reminding the public the same thing about the way they speak to reps of the train companies, even if they are under stress because the whole service has gone pear shaped.

(Reminder: I'm not, and never have been, a railway worker)

I love the bit about EMT presenting on staff involvement and training. They ought to practice what they preach.

Anyone who follows the travails of RailUK Forums member RJ (and others) would know how woeful the training is in their Revenue Protection department. From the frontline, right up to the Prosecutions Manager. Their policies appear to be, 'shoot first, ask questions later', and 'guilty until proved innocent'.

Much appreciated, thanks!

This "joined up thinking" - a single national database for each dataset, and links between datasets, could do so much for us.  By "Prediction Engine" do you mean the system that guesses how long your delay will be?   Does this coming together mean that the cancellations and late change system will be linked to the timetable and schedule system, so that the ticket booking systems won't offer you timings on trains that have already been cancelled?


From a purely personal viewpoint, I hope that doesn't mean dumbing down - I was rather sad to see our local CIS screen that gave all sorts of intermediate points when first installed drop back to "between X and Y" where X and Y are stations.  Perhaps better for the occasional traveller ... not so useful for the regular.

It isn't just the railways having the programming problem.  My industry, biology research, is producing vast quantities of data at the moment, but we are lacking people with the skills suitable to process and analyse it.  The whole problem of my generation being taught how to make text bold in Microsoft Word, rather than being taught proper computer science has probably added to this considerably.  I can only hope that I am in quite a good position at the moment.

Having read about RJ's experiences, I made sure to have my ticket endorsed at Waterloo yesterday prior to making my onward journey with EMT, having been delayed considerably at Wimbledon on my way to London.  I still got some questions asked and the train manager didn't seem particular convinced with my "excuse", as he put it.  Also didn't seem happy with me using a railcard on a ^9.25 ticket before 10am.  Quickly put him right with that one.

Apologies once more for not picking up on the points raised until now. As far as I understand it, the Darwin Prediction Engine bases its delay estimations on real-time running information from around the system plus input from TOC controls. Its key advantage is that it is ONE engine rather than having the current 17 trying to interface with each other... The implementation on the Chiltern App for Marylebone arrivals and departures does show some of the benefits already (as do the CIS monitor screens at Birmingham International.
 
As to interfacing with TVMs / web sites etc, this was seen as desirable but not yet achievable.

Re using Plain Englisgh - I've been involved with ATOC on pax research on this - we were referencing things like 'vestibule', 'disembarking (from) the train', that sort of thing.

doorway & leaving the train were the agreed corrections - but there were many others!

I hope they dealt satisfactorily with the annoying 'arriving into' and 'final destination'...   ::)

Paul

*snort*

Yep, those were two more....arrivating at....no final!