Creator of UKTrains site is MIR’s very own Ben Smith — UPDATED

Our very own Ben Smith is being hunted by the BBC this afternoon. All things being equal I think he’ll be on BBC Radio 4 later today.

They’re after him because of of his brilliant creation: UKTrains.

Here’s the service overview:

Inspired by this tweet from MP Tom Watson and enabled by the excellent BBC Backstage’s travel feeds, this prototype service tweets disruption alerts for 25 UK train operators. The original data is processed and shortened to less than 140 characters (in most cases) by Yahoo Pipes and tweeted via Twitterfeed which also adds a short-link back to the original BBC report. Tweetlater provides the automated welcome DM.

I’ve been using it for a week or so now and it’s come in REALLY, REALLY handy. It’s excellent to have the updates appear in my Twitter stream.

Of course, services like this shouldn’t have to exist. But our rail companies resonating with neolithic incompetence can’t even get their trains running properly (“wrong kind of snow”), let alone get you decent feeds like this.

Instead you end up having to pay 25p plus the cost of a text message to be notified when your train operator has screwed up. That is class-A rubbish.

So kudos to Ben for creating the service.

Head over to the UKTrains site for more information and to subscribe to alerts for your area: http://uktrains.pbwiki.com/.

Update:

Listen to Ben’s interview!

Recently Published

“Apple will only sell 100,000 of their headsets in the first year” Really?

BGR reports a TrendForce estimate that Apple will sell 100k units of their new headset when released and says “but that’s still a big...

The BlackBerry Movie: Worth a look, but it’s heavy on fiction

I went to see the BlackBerry movie last night here in Dubai. I was astonished to find the movie theatre almost full, apart from...

Question: When is the only time a traffic jam is good news in the UK?

Answer: When you're sitting in the back of an Uber and you need reliable mobile signal. Boom! Sad, isn't it, dear reader? Travel all around...

Ah yes, an S23 with a BlackBerry Bold Keyboard: Exactly what I (think) I need

I was playing with Midjourney, the AI/photo generation service and I asked it to show me what a Samsung S23 would look like with...

It’s ok, your moon photos aren’t fake, they are just enhanced – quite a bit

Have you taken a photo of the moon recently? I almost did, the other day, when I spotted a fabulous moment here in Dubai....

Don’t move! You’ll jinx it! This looks like a tiny bit of innovation in the mobile world

It has been quite a while since I’ve seen anything in the mobile industry that’s caused me to want to write much. Just look...