National Rail website buried ahead of snow storm

Commuters desperate to avoid spending the night in a railway station or being eaten by their snow-bound fellow commuters were left none the wiser if they went to the National Rail website this afternoon. The site, operated by the Association of Train Operating Companies, is a clearing house for train service information in the …

[M7S]

Act of God

Hollyoaks stopped from filming.

He is merciful indeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't they

just get ahead filming next years Christmas special. Then all the soaps can actually portray REAL SNOW. Or is that a bit too progressive for such soaps?

[Rick Berry]

Snowstorm? What Snowstorm?

The boys out at East Anglia are predicting sunny and 15+ degrees C. outside. Of course, they destroyed their original data and are using their super accurate computer prediction model instead...

[John Angelico]

Egad!

A sunny 15+, eh?

Maybe we'll see Dr Phil Jones (semi-retired) getting about in a T-Shirt!

Written from balmy Melbourne Vic Australia where today's temp peaked at +23C

[Anonymous Coward]

Also down

Merseytravel.gov.uk was also down - I had to look outside to see if the buses were running. Its back now telling me that they definitely aren't.

Also employer sent an email sending people home and saying to check email for further info - which promptly went down too

Ah! Disaster planning at its finest :)

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just the front end that's snowed in!

Being fortunate enough to understand the technology behind NRE, it's just the front end that's snowed in. The back end (which is still accessible via the web) is fully operational.

[Number6]

Lucky Ones?

Sounds like Inverness has the best part of the deal, separated from the Sassenachs.

Big thumbs-up for the crayfish sandwich line as well.

[Anonymous Coward]

@nationalrailenq

Earlier on, whoever is behind the keyboard at the @nationalrailenq twitter feed was answering questions directed there by individual punters. Damn good show.

At this time (16:07) it appears to be just the standard list of outages that you would have seen on the web site if it was up.

Regards

Neil

[Anonymous Coward]

Snow joke

It's not just the national rail site that's disappeared under the avalanche - Etraffic England (http://www.trafficengland.com) is also snowed under:

----------

To meet the current high demand, we have switched to a lighter version of the site. The main difference is that the map has been disabled. For live traffic information visit the Traffic Flows and Disruptions Search sections.

Please accept our apologies for the disruption to service and be assured that we will re-instate the full service at the earliest opportunity.

----------

[Stef 2]

But if the snow is that bad...

how will the Daily Mail ever get delivered?!

Millions of hysterical paranoid racists won't be able to get their daily fix of.. well, paranoid hysterical racism.

Clearly, "Nu Labor" are to blame.

[Gav H.]

Panic Buying

Crayfish sandwiches... that's another keyboard and monitor covered with coffee. Well done :)

[Jasper UK]

Avoid the drifts

Just use the ye olde mobile version (http://wap.nationalrail.co.uk/). I always do, in place of the bloated PDA or the super bloated full version.

[Fluffykins]

May I for one

Thank our Crayfish Sarnie Munching Overlords for the wrong kind of snow on the leaves.

[stickman]

national rail sucks

the national rail website makes me blue with rage. it regularly goes down at weekends, they call this 'planned engineering works'

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only but also

those who prefer the motorcar were also left in the dark as the normally excellent http://www.trafficengland.com was (and at this moment still is) only running a "lighter version".

[Anonymous Coward]

Three mobile broken by a snowflake?

Sorry, My3 is not available at the moment.

We're working on this now and expect My3 to be back up and running by midnight.

Got a 3 mobile? You can still use My3, just press Planet 3, then My3.

Want to Top-up or check your balance on your Pay As You Go mobile? Call 444.

Thanks for your patience.

[Richard Porter]

@stickman

no, the latest phrase is "improvement works" even if it means normal maintenance.

[Richard Porter]

Soaps stopped from filming

Heaven forfend that there should be any realism in soaps!

I suppose it would be too much work to write a bit of snow into the scripts?

[John Angelico]

Soaps stopped from filming?

Chemically speaking, does that mean the bubble has burst?

Err, the anorak AND the duffel coat please. It looks pretty cold out there...

[LinkOfHyrule]

Crayfish and stockbrokers

Bang on! Top quality reporting!

See, this is where the Reg gets it right and the BBC, Gaudrian (sic) etc get it so wrong. They dress up the news to make it sound all "polite" and "acceptable" but ignore the harsh realities, unlike the Register which tells it like it is!

I live in the stockbroker belt, breaks my heart to see all the bankers literally freezing their red braces off at my local station. We should set up some sort of fund for them!

[Boris the Cockroach]

And

according to the tories we only have 8 days gas supplies left in stock.

right, only supplies I need to get are a new bbq, some charchol , and some skewers, and in 9 days when the food and heat run out, its time to eat the neighbours.

oh must get some chanti and some fava beans too ffffssssssffsfsfsffsfsfs

[kwikbreaks]

BBQ

@Boris the Cockroach

If you are planning on BBQing the neighbours then make sure you buy propane as the more common butane won't work at these temperatures and indoor cooking using a BBQ may invalidate your insurance.

[Chris Parsons]

What?

Charchol? Chanti?

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming...

Doesnt look like Global Warming has arrived here...

But as we say, if Gobal Warming makes Scotland a couple of degrees warmer and floods London its a bit of a result really

[Winkypop]

In case you were wondering...

..it was 39oC here yesterday...

(sorry)

[Anonymous Coward]

A handy tip

Try 'Accessible UK Train Timetables' at http://traintimes.org.uk/ instead. No problems apparent there and it even lets you view the current positions of the trains nearing stations in realtime on google maps.

I don't bother with the official train companies' websites at all anymore. They're all either horribly slow at the best of times or worse laden with adverts and other bloat to make them near unnavigable.

[Martin Edwards]

Perhaps if it wasn't half a megabyte...

When the new National Rail Enquiries website appeared, I thought it was a bit slow to load, so checked and found that the home page -- complete with its rich background images and Flash advertising -- weighs in at around 500 KB. I was astonished. I notice that the current "lighter version" is still more than 200 KB.

I should add though that I'm yet to completely trust Chrome's "Web Inspector", from which I took these readings. It sometimes reports some curious file sizes, like 0 or -1 bytes.

[Anonymous Coward]

"make sure you buy propane"

Her indoors is in West Berks (the authority that has famously has just had to scrounge grit from nearby authorities who've had just as much cold weather and just as much snow but unlike WBC actually had enough grit for the season).

Till recently there was no mains gas where she is, so cooking was electric and/or propane.

It's been so cold (just about freezing, or lower) since before Christmas that the propane hasn't been evaporating quickly enough to run one ring, never mind two. You can kick it into life for a while by pouring some hot water over the gas cylinder, IF the leccy's still on to heat the water :)

Too many overhead mains cables and overhead transformers here. 20,000 homes lost power in the area on Wednesday. At the end of the road is a tree branch that will soon break under the weight of snow and ice, which will bring down a phone cable and kill service to a couple of streets or more. And there are plenty more like it.

Flame, 'cos the multifuel woodstove is the most reliable local heat source at the moment.

[Stephen Gee]

Silly soaps

How ridiculous that those urban soaps are disrupted while The Archers is unaffected.