Category: Travel

Pictures of Historic & Listed Railway Buildings.

And the New Adlestrop Railway Atlas.

That is, if you like that sort of thing, ahem.

Flicking through TV in the hotel room, I found what looked like a Dutch detective series called (great Dutch name) Grijpstra & de Gier.

Every time I try to buy a train ticket from the Trainline in the UK, I get angry. It just has too many brainless avoidable problems, such as:

• The site is unbearably slow and clunky, particularly compared to something like Expedia
• It only seems to work well on Windows PCs running IE
• The error messages are of the classic Microsoft “Something went wrong, and it could be one of these twenty things, or something else”; and
• It lets you try and buy cheap tickets before telling you that only the expensive ones are available.

All this is annoying in itself, but when you consider that the railways are competing against airlines for business, you would think that someone would try and sort the situation out. Apparently not. Even the market hasn’t worked (a common complaint in the rail industry) – when a better, speedier competitor (QJump) opened a couple of years back, the Trainline bought it.

I’m beginning to think it might be run by Microsoft.

The Association of Train Operating Companies has published a short pamphlet, restating the environmental benefits of rail over road transport and short-haul flying.