Great Western Coffee Shop

From the FGW website :

05:19 Gloucester to Southampton Central due 08:09

This train will be started from Westbury.It will no longer call at: Gloucester, Stonehouse, Stroud, Kemble, Swindon, Chippenham, Melksham and Trowbridge.This train will run short formed with 1 carriages.This is due to an earlier train fault.

From the FGW alert sent to me at 07:45am:


On Mon 29/09/08  7:45 AM , First Great Western Alerting Service noreply@nexusalpha.com sent:
> Dear Phil,
>
>
>
> There are no disruptions reported at this time affecting services between
> your selected stations, Melksham to Swindon.
>
>
> Further Information is available at http://www.firstgreatwestern.co.uk.
>

If that was sent at 07:45 then the 05:19 from Gloucester wouldn't be included, pointless to tell have a altered train after it's due to have been and gone.

But I have it set up so that it ought to have warned me.

According to the FGW website (quoted below), the system will alert me to ANY cancellations and disruptions that may affect my journey.

If I get up in the morning expecting to catch the 06:40 from my local station, Melksham - the same train which happens to be the 05:19 off Gloucester Central - then surely I ought to be alerted to the fact that the train now won't be calling at my station at all? God knows we get few enough trains calling at Melksham as it is  :-\

I realise it's a free service that I subscribed to and that I shouldn't therefore expect too much from it, but honestly I don't see the point of it being there at all if it's not going to do the job it's advertised as doing.

What if I had been expecting someone to have alighted from that train and made their way to my house? The automated alert contacts me to say there are no disruptions and that everything's fine. I could be really panicking, wondering where the person had got to. Only when I contact FGW do they tell me "oh no, it's ok - that train didn't run at all, so your dear old auntie can't have been on it after all..."

There's only one thing worse than being given no information at all, and that's being given duff information.

Please feel free to shoot me down on this one, but Phil as you have asked for notification of Melksham TO Swindon you aren't likely be to be notified of problems with trains FROM Swindon TO Melksham, I would guess you would have to set that up as a different notification.  ???

Or have I missed something here.

You could be right... I don't think the software is that sensitive to user requirements though. Basically I assumed by selecting two stations, Melksham and Swindon, it would notify me of trains travelling in either direction (useful for both going to work and coming home again).

Some thoughts ...

I had an intersting decision to make with that diagram that I draw on the top left of these pages - whether to show problems on services that have already completed their journeys or not, and I decided to show journeys that were recently completed as well as currently running and not-yet-started services.

My reasons for showing recently completed journeys was to give our visitors here something of a view of which lines may be showing "aftershocks" - something that could be of interest to our more astute visitors, but perhaps not to the more general traveller.  Quite frankly, I hadn't considered the fact that people might want to know about recent completed cancellations because of the non-appearance of Great Aunt Agnes.  But "show past data or not" is an interesting question and the FGW team have a difficult choice on it.

On asking for "Melksham TO Swindon" only giving one direction ... from a computer viewpoint, yes, that's logical.   From a practical viewpoint, perhaps shorter journey and regular notification request, which are likely to be made by people travelling up and down would be best reporting both ways, but single requests for longer routes would be best one way.   I'm just musing here - people have a wide varirty of reasons / requirements for the data and you ain't going to please all the people all the time!

I don't know for definate, but the system lets you add more than one journey, so could only assume it's to do something like Melksham to Swindon AND Swindon to Melksham