South Western Railway 4+

Just tried using the app to organise my ticket for tomorrow. I was able to choose my train but could not get any further due to ‘a technical problem.’ Disappointed but not surprised as this country’s rail system and governance is poorer than that of many developing countries. An inept labour force devoid of much if any common sense, train stock that has seen better days and a lack of investment or care from government. Is it me or has the whole world turned to utter crap since the Chinese shared their pandemic? It might as well have been a nuclear warhead, which would have caused considerably less damage.

Updated the app today, but it’s still full of bugs and still a reason why I don’t use it and prefer to stick with other apps like TrainLine. I open the app ok, found the ticket I wanted and added a railcard all without issue. The issue I then encountered was that, in order to purchase the ticket I needed to sign in, ok no problem. However, once signed in there was no visible payment method coming up nor any way to add one. There was also a box above showing ticket delivery type as e-ticket, but when I clicked on this I got a “Something went wrong” error message. Unless it’s possible to buy a ticket through this app, then what’s the point?! All this app becomes useful for is seeing train times and platform information… nothing more. Useless. Please make this app useful and PLEASE make Apple Pay an integrated part of the app. E-tickets should also be available to add to the Apple Wallet for ease of access at stations. I don’t want it in an email.

Just when I think it couldn’t get worse it has. The live train status now includes routes with changes but this has the affect of now only letting you see about 30 mins into the future. You can now no longer plan when to depart work efficiently as you can’t see when the later trains run and given how variable the service is, this is a serious setback. It’s also many many clicks to buy a ticket even when you want the same route every time (as I find I don’t move house that often). It also struggles to load tickets into the app after buying at times and I’m not clear why it can’t integrate with apple wallet. Original review: Poor app. Clunky and when planning you can only see 4 trains at a time and have to adjust a time entry box to scroll forward and back in time. Horrible UI written by people who don’t care about customers.

Update: wow they managed to add even more clicks to displaying a ticket. Great work guys!