At The Register, Alistair Dabbs reveals some unfortunate truths about the French railway service (the Société nationale des chemins de fer français or SNCF) and its mobile app:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, 1May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
Actually, the hotel app is rubbish. The booking system is slow, the property information incomplete and some of the buttons don’t do anything at all. From time to time, the app flashes up a notification inviting you to install the app … er, that you’re already running. Much better to book using a proper computer. Still, flashing the screen around got me the Presidential Disability Suite. Franklin D rocked a wheelchair, remember, and I’m a fan.
This, however, pales into insignificance with the tedious and frankly silly collection of smartphone apps I had to juggle to manage my train journey to get here. Yes, it’s my own fault for trying to navigate my way across France on public transport in the midst of a general strike but surely that’s precisely the kind of thing digital communications ought to be able to help you with, don’t you agree?
Map of the French railways on which the TGV (LGV: blue; normal tracks: black) and Intercités (grey) SNCF trains run. Only lines going to and from Paris are shown here.
Wikimedia Commons.The French train company, SNCF, has been doing its best by notifying travellers with bookings every day at 17:00 which of the following day’s trains would be running and which would be cancelled. I’m a lifelong union member myself and I fully support the workers’ rights to … oh buggeration, my TGV’s been rerouted to set off from a city 300km away. Fucking union arsewipes – sack ’em all bastard wankers.
Oh well, I thought, I’ll just have to work out another way. Fire up the SNCF booking app!
A banner at the top informs me that I should seek information about which train services are running by checking its Twitter feed. So I launch the Twitter app. SNCF on Twitter says I should check via the idiotic INOUI brand for TGV bookings. So I launch the INOUI app. This tells me I should check with SNCF or, if I want more information, click on a highlighted link. I click on it: it links to a one-sentence message that tells me there is a strike on and that train services may be affected.
Two hours of thumb-numbing smartphone tomfoolery later, I have worked out my own alternative route via multiple connecting services. This was made more challenging by the SNCF and INOUI apps providing contradictory information about the same journey. Best of all is they can’t agree on where my TGV will actually go. Will it reach its terminus as usual or will it apparently go inexplicably missing from the tracks in the countryside outside Lille? According to SNCF and INOUI, it will do both. It’s Schrodinger’s train.
Just as I go to bed, the Eurostar app sends me a notification reminding me to get to my local station on time tomorrow to catch the TGV that’s been cancelled.
As you can see, my much prolonged, zig-zag route up the country and into Blighty worked, no thanks to these ridiculous apps. It wasn’t all bad: I got to see more French farmland than I expected and experienced first-hand the extraordinarily rich cultural variety of train station beggars that France has to offer the modern rail traveller.
