Wrong kind of traffic on the network
OBVIOUSLY UK TRAIN company Web Sites have been suffering from the wrong kind of traffic on the lines - plenty of it. South West Trains' site was down yesterday and things aren't much better today.
With the South West side of Greater London particularly badly hit by adverse weather conditions (technically known as snow), rail web sites have been bombarded with hits.
According to reports, the South West Trains site had a warning yesterday morning that said, 'Sorry, our website is temporarily unavailable due to heavy site traffic, leading to technical difficulties'.
Late last night the UK's national railways web site operated by National Rail was advising potential travellers to forget about travelling today (3rd February) on services operated by South West.
However, there was a glimmer of hope that trains operated by Southern trains might run every hour. Especially since the National Rail site operates a live departures board service which provides real-time information.
The INQ attempted to track a possible train via the live departures service and even selected the 'refresh automatically' option. Sadly this service fell over, too.
The obvious alternative was to request SMS (text) updates from the Train Tracker service. Despite successfully registering two different handsets with Train Tracker, no text messages have arrived so far.
It appears that National Rail's data services require the IT equivalent of a snowplough to get themselves back up to speed again. µ
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The highways agency link to show you the state of the motorways links to
traffic-england.co.uk
If you try and look up the stae of say the m5 in the south all you get is box telling you
"Due to high demand the map is currently disabled, we are sorry for the inconvenience. "
This seems to be a permanent message too
here 'tis
http://www.traffic-england.co.uk/
I spoke to Natwest on the phone to try to find a branch open, and the lady tried phoning a few. Each time no one answered the phone she said that it could be they were short staffed and not answering the phone, or the branch was closed. I asked that shouldn't she know if the branch was open or closed, she said they didn't know.
Local branch had a note up on the window saying "due to unforeseen circumstances we will be closed until further notice". Lol. The circumstances are called "snow". It was forcast so it's not unforeseen. And "until further notice", why don't you just say until tomorrow?
Could I politely suggest http://uktrains.pbwiki.com (wot I made) which supplied BBC and crowd-sourced travel news via Twitter throughout the disruption (and is still doing it) and stayed up throughout.
What the hell ?
I would have never have thought just a few inches of snow and it shuts down a good portion of the country.
Our neighborhood has 6-7 foot high snow banks eh! just grab a shovel and start digging out.
Moto