Catch a train with your mobile phone

Mobile phones can help commuters avoid delayed trains

By BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward

Commuters may never have to rush for the train again.

Railtrack is developing a system that will let mobile phone owners find out if their train is running on time.

When it goes live travellers with mobile phones that support the Wireless Application Protocol (Wap) will be able to check travel details and see how punctual the trains are.

Wap filters text information from web pages and displays the words on your phone.

A Wap timetable service went live this week, and Railtrack is planning to make the other services available later this year.

Mobile timetable

Wap phones that can access a subset of the internet are becoming increasingly popular even though they have only been available in large quantities for a few months.

Railtrack says eventually phone users will be able to interrogate the timetable service using the text messages that every GSM mobile phone can send.

In Europe these messages, that can contain up to 160 characters, are hugely popular. Over two billion of them are sent every month.

Railtrack said the Wap based timetable service will complement the National Rail Enquiry Service that deals with 60 million enquiries per year.

Railtrack is already testing the SMS and Wap services that will give real-time train information, but these will not go live until later this year

Timetable too

A rival service is also being developed by the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC), the trade body for rail operators.

An ATOC spokeswoman said it was talking to Orange, Vodafone, One2One and BTCellnet about setting up real-time information services that are expected to go live in the autumn.

At the moment Virgin allows customers to buy train tickets with their phones but no-one is offering real-time train or timetable information.

A pilot of the "Train Times" service using Nokia 7110 phones and the Orange network was shown off last year at the Labour Party conference in Bournemouth.

Some train companies, such as First North Western, Great North Eastern and Midland Mainline, already put real-time train information on their websites. However none of them has extended the service to include mobile phones.

South West Trains said it was planning to give travellers more information about the punctuality of its trains using electronic notice boards on platforms.

A spokeswoman added that it was investigating SMS and Wap services but had no date for when it would be using them.

"It could be implemented fairly swiftly but we would want to get it right," she said, "If it was not 100% right it could cause more problems than it solves."

The Railtrack timetable wapsite can be found at http://www.railtrack.co.uk/i.wml