Review: Rail Tickets
Score:
74%
You know the feeling: you're on a bus or in a taxi to the train station and you're cutting it very fine. What if there's a queue at the ticket office? Always welcoming new ways to find train times and buy tickets from a smartphone, here I review Rail Tickets, the official application for First Capital Connect/First Great Western here in the UK, for all S60 5th Edition and Symbian^3 phones - despite its Java implementation it does a competent enough job to keep it installed.
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Initial impressions are somewhat frustrating, since Rail Tickets takes a good ten seconds to start up, with a pink progress bar idling across the screen, though in fairness everything is fairly smooth once it's up and running. There's a 'wizard'-like sequence of forms, with screens animating to the left as indicated below. 'Find Trains' is the logical starting point, presenting a pretty and intuitive graphical dialog for entering journey details (using a custom thumb qwerty on-screen keyboard), including railcard selection, as shown:
It's at this point that an alarm bell went off in my head, since there's no obvious way to select more than one 'traveller'. Fine if this is just for yourself, but if you've got a partner or a child with you then you'd have to go through the purchase process multiple times. Something to be aware of.
Next up is 'Select dates', with convenient pop-up calendar and hour entry panes, though the latter would have been far neater to implement as a set of scrolling wheels. Handily, you can work from arrival times as well as departures:
Tapping on 'Find times and fares' pops up a series of status messages, including some saying 'Encrypting...' Your queries are all encrypted on their wat to First Capital Connect's servers - unnecessary for timetable lookups, but more important for the credit card/purchase section later in the wizard process.
The ticket prices shown then lead to a 'juggling' screen where you can look earlier and later around your preferred journey time, in case the price varies significantly. All nicely implemented, even if (as I said earlier) it's all limited to one traveller.
Once a specific journey has been selected, it's into the payment section - the information presented at each point is clear and attractive and it's very easy to forget that this is all implemented in Java - it's fully touch/nHD-aware throughout. I didn't go through the payment right to the end for obvious reasons (I didn't want an unwanted train charge on my credit card!), but Rail Tickets claims to be able to remember your card details for faster purchases of tickets for the same 'journey' (i.e. departure/destination/preferences set) on another date.
Of note is that by default all purchased tickets have to be picked up in the departure station at the appropriate pick-up point. This makes sense in the stated 'running late for a train' scenario - most online train systems have a 'by post' option too, but then if this was days in advance, you'd be at home and so would be doing all this on a much larger computer/screen.
In addition, some journeys (depending on the rail operator and destinations) support 'mTickets' (mobile Tickets, essentially 2D barcodes with your details), which are sent over the same encrypted connection within the Rail Tickets application and appear under 'My Tickets'. These can then be scanned by the ticket inspector at a station or on the train, as needed.
I thought it good that you do get warned about possible mobile data costs, though the estimate of '1p' for an entire transaction is optimistic - some pay-as-you-go tariffs charge for any data use that day, instantly slapping on a (e.g.) £1 charge. Still, in this day and age most users will know their own data tariff details and will be able to take responsibility.
It's at this point that long time AAS readers will be thinking that all this is rather familiar. And they'd be right. It was ringing a bell with me too. I dug through the archives and found Ewan's review of 'Trainline Tickets', which looks to be a slightly earlier version of this same app, done for the Trainline ticketing company rather than First Capital Connect (a.k.a. First Great Western) here. Good to see the Symbian application evolve though (this is v1.05.21), developers Masabi have carved out an interesting little niche for themselves here.
A small and free utility that's well worth keeping on your smartphone if you live (or travel regularly) in the UK.
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 7th December 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at