Interweb Data

On a journey up to Manchester on Tuesday I became aware of the Senior Railcard, a device that gives over 60s 30% off off-peak rail fares. The woman in the seat next to me was using one. Never using rail, unless for work, it's not of much use to me (at least until Hay reaches 60 next year, when we may use rail a bit more frequently); however, to save money on car collections I managed to persuade my boss to pay for one for me - £30 for 12 months, or £70 for 3. He wouldn't do the 3 years because he didn't think I'd live that long. 

Signing up for one of these cards would normally be no problem and should take no longer than a couple of minutes, but trying to do it on the rail line from Bristol to Manchester is a totally different matter due to Vodafone mobile data coverage being patchy, to say the least. It took me from Birmingham to Manchester to fill in the relevant form, which is about an hour.

If you manage to find a spot with 4 or 5G coverage, it lasts no more than 30 seconds before the phone shows the dreaded E, which stands for EDGE and is is as useful as no data at all, which happens to be the situation for over half the time. EDGE is allegedly between 100 and 200 kbps, but I generally find it facilitates nothing more than a text.

Other people have complained about this particular line and the excuse from Vodafone is that the fast transition from tower to tower has a deleterious effect, yet I don't have the same problems on the line to Paddington.

It's incredible to think that when the internet was initially developed, we were browsing quite happily at 32 kbps on dial-up and there wasn't a single advert on websites to bloat your browsing experience. Images were stripped down to their minimum, yet today you're downloading images that haven't been optimised in the slightest.

I downloaded the Railcard App once I'd signed up. It was 32Mb and does nothing more than display your railcard photo and the number. Any other features are performed by linking you to an external website. Why it's 32Mb is a mystery. In my younger days I wrote a programme that calculated your position on the globe using spherical trigonometry in under 1024 kilobytes, which was all that was available at the time on the programmable calculator I used.

Then came the issue of trying to get the Trainline App to recognise a Senior Railcard I'd purchased outside of the App. The Trainline customer support people were of no use and gave me the number of the customer support people at National Rail, from whom I'd bought the Senior Railcard. They passed me back to the Trainline. I eventually discovered how to do it myself.

Another problem with that particular railway line is that it's also impossible to keep track of where you are with GPS. The windows must be treated with some kind of shielding.