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Topic: I'm now connected while on the move.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-24-2007 11:03 AM
I tried the wifi on a thankfully no more Grim Never-Ending Ripoff train (£190 return from York to London - bargain!!!), but it was so slow as to be pretty much unusable for web browsing. And as their connection blocks outgoing traffic to your SMTP server, you can't even send emails either. And needless to say, as soon as you went into a tunnel, that was that.
On the day of our work Christmas party I took a train from York to Leeds earlier this month (to be able to have a drink and not have to drive home) - the first time I'd used one for several weeks. This was shortly after GNER's demise, and their logo had been painted out on all the carriages and replaced with a National Express one. But they were clearly the same trains and carriages. Funny - I thought that if a new company was taking over the line, they'd bring their trains with them rather than buy the old ones from the previous operator. From example, when BMI took over the Teesside-Heathrow route from Shitish Airways (oops, Freudian slip!), they replaced BA's 737s with their own Embraers (not to mention cutting the fares by about half, which I wait with bated breath to see if National Express will do on the York-London train fares). It seems that the same principle doesn't apply in the railway industry - possibly because the vehicles are designed to the requirements of specific lines and can't be used elsewhere?
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 12-24-2007 12:43 PM
I can't comment on the Wi-fi service on trains because I've never used it; it's not available on the few routes that I use, such as the Chiltern one to Birmingham, which I use about once per month. I was going there yesterday to buy some more things from the five week long German Christmas Market, which closed yesterday.
The 3G connection that I could get for much of the journey is supposed to be 1.8Mb/s, and it seems comparable to the home connection was when I had 1Mb. I've now got 3 point something at home. Where 3G isn't available and the mobile device falls back to GPRS it connects at fifty something kb/s, and feels pretty similar to a dial-up connection. I get 3GB limit for £20 per month, with VOIP services, such as Skype, banned. There's an option which allows those, and has a 10GB per month limit, at a higher cost.
It's no good for transferring huge files, or streaming high-def video, but it's very usable for reading e-mail, browsing web pages, sending up to work documents that I've typed on the journey, etc. I've also used it to deal with e-mails on the bus, before arriving at work.
Obviously, the coverage will vary, depending on the location; tunnels aren't too much of a problem on the route where I was yesterday; If you were doing something like Leeds - Bradford - Manchester it would be a different matter.
I won't be needing the mobile connection for a while; I'm staying in over Christmas and New Year in the hope that my health will improve somewhat before I return to work, so I've lent the device to somebody else, so he can use it while staying with his Mother in Portsmouth; she has no broadband access. I'll find out from him what the access is like down there.
With a very few exceptions, trains are not owned by train operating companies, and will not normally change when the franchise moves to a new operator, though an operator may make a commitment to introduce new trains at some future time during the franchise, as part of their bid. The rolling stock leasing companies are all now owned by banks, but I can't remember who owns which. GNER charged very high fares, and couldn't afford the premium payments required by heir franchise. NEEC have bid to pay a higher amount, in a shorter time period; quite how they will be able to afford this is unclear. They have said that they intend to raise fares. Give that I have refused to use GNER for the last three years or so, mainly because their fares were so high, it's unlikely that I will experience NEEC. Southern, Chiltern, South-West Trains and whatever Thameslink is called these days are about the only trains that I still use, and only use these infrequently.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-29-2007 04:32 PM
Mark H: Thanks for the explanation. Didn't know that the trains effectively come with the franchise.
From what I understand of GNER, their basic problem was that their bid for the franchise renewal was unrealistically high. In order to pay the government the price they offered, fares AND passenger numbers had to rise, while service standards remained the same. The effect of this which hit me the most was that the sanely priced fares I did use occasionally (e.g. the £60 first class return from York to London) effectively disappeared - you needed to book at least 6-8 weeks in advance to get a snowball's chance in a microwave of finding one (compared to 1-2 weeks in advance previously), and even then you had to make one of the legs on, for example, the 0500 from King's Cross on a Saturday morning. In contrast, the £60 flight from Teesside to Heathrow is still usually available, on reasonably convenient flights, 1-2 weeks ahead. Despite the faff of getting to and from airports, it's still cheaper and more reliable. But living a 10-minute walk from York station it's a pain. If National Express do reintroduce some competitive fares I may be lured back, though.
Mark G: If the alcohol-induced railway investor in The Titfield Thunderbolt had been made to pay GNER prices for his tipple (almost £5 for a G & T the last time I succumbed to temptation), he'd either have emigrated or converted to Methodism, I guess!
Interesting about the Ealing analogy: on another list I read someone posted a story about the Egyptian government trying to copyright images of the pyramids. I replied that if they get away with that, then the protagonists in The Lavender Hill Mob would not only have had to worry about being done for the theft of the gold, but also for copyright infringement in the way they disguised it!
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