Some breaking good news from the team at National Rail Enquiries (who's services we recommend you switch to)...
Their service to send you journey-specific alerts (previously offered by SMS at 25p per disruption 'event') now also operates by Twitter DM for free.
If anything gave us confidence that ATOC are making progress in this area, this does.
Try the service for yourself here: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/alerts
For full details and a full list of accounts see the original front page.
@uktrains was an unofficial train disruption Twitter service for UK rail travellers. It was:
The service first gained significant use (and some media coverage) in February 2009 when heavy snow caused mass travel disruption and caused many official sources of alerts to fail.
The service operated for approximately two and a half years, was followed by over 10,000 almost 20,000 people at peak and issued over 50,000 over 85,000 travel tweets. [Corrected]
The BBC has ended the excellent Backstage project which was the source for the bulk of the data. Although crowd-sourced data augmented the BBC-provided alerts these alone are not sufficient for the service to remain viable. This has affected all the other services using this data too.
National Rail Enquiries now run a set of official Twitter accounts tweeting travel information for UK operators. This is the best general replacement for the @uktrains service.
A number of rail companies are also providing customer service directly via Twitter now too. Ben is now maintaining a Twitter list of these accounts.
Ben is still happy to take comments or questions on the service and his contact details are still available.
A message from Ben:
The @uktrains service led to the creation of National Rail Enquiries own official service and I've since met with staff from ATOC (who operate National Rail Enquiries) on a number of occasions to offer support, suggestions and (occasional) constructive criticism. This has always been well received and the enthusiasm of the ATOC team gives me confidence that the official service will improve even further over time. I'll happily continue to offer ATOC as much support as they would like from the creation and operation of @uktrains.
I'd also like to thank a small but reliable group who fed crowd-sourced alerts into the system. These were invaluable during major incidents, adding information and context that the official sources often lack. I'd urge you to keep tweeting about your travel experiences and to let National Rail Enquiries know how you would like their service to develop - they are listening.
We have influenced rail operators' attitudes towards communicating with customers via social media - we can continue to do so.
Despite the positive progress since @uktrains was first established there's still a way to go: