National Rail Enquiries

National Rail Enquiries is the main source of rail information in the UK: providing passengers with everything they need to know about travelling by train. By enabling passengers to obtain all of their travel information in one place, NRE provides the train operators with £450m of ticket sales opportunities each year.

Our key drivers are to increase ticket sales, to grow our registered customer base and to continue our dominance as the #1 web site in the travel/transport sector while further reducing costs. We are focussed on improving the speed, accuracy and availability of information through a variety of media across the industry. And by providing rebranded services to the train operators, we help to keep the cost of information provision down whilst also improving consistency – NRE provides over 250 services to 45 clients.

We provide the industry’s best source of real time train information, and we will continue to innovate to meet emerging business opportunities in pursuit of our aims.

National Rail Enquiries Website

The website, currently ranked the number 1 most visited site in the travel and transport sector (Hitwise), has more than 7 million unique visitors each month. It provides a comprehensive suite of services including:

Online Journey Planner, with season ticket calculator, pocket timetable, and seamless links to on-line ticket retailers
Live Departure Boards, where customers can obtain a real time indication of the arrivals and departures at any of 2500 National Rail stations
Service disruption information, providing real time details of train service disruption across the National Rail network, planned and short notice alterations and engineering works
Stations Made Easy, with 2500 interactive station maps and over 700,000 photos making navigation of the UK rail network easier for passengers, especially those with disabilities
LISA, state of the art virtual assistant that helps users with information about their journey or with National Rail Enquiries website
PDA and WAP versions of the journey planner and Live Departure Boards.
Products and Promotions
Stations Information including local transport connections.
How to get to places of interest by rail

Customer Satisfaction

The latest survey result was 90% of customers would recommend the site to family and friends.

Live Departure Boards Windows Gadget

This is a desktop gadget for the Microsoft Vista operating system and allows users an at-a-glance view of the latest train running information for a particular train station or direct journey.

TrainTracker™: 08712004950

This is an interactive voice recognition service where customers can access timetable and fares information when they are away from the internet.

In summary TrainTracker™ (call 08712004950):

uses speech recognition which allows the caller to say what they want
looks up train times within the next 12 weeks and delivers these to the caller
suggests alternative journeys when there is disruption offers simple fares information
can store frequently requested journeys for quicker recognition

At times of rail service disruption, demand to our contact centres can be higher than predicted and callers can end up in a queue. TrainTracker™ is designed to provide a quick, alternative means for the provision of train timetables at these busy times.

Customer Satisfaction

The latest survey result was 75% of our customers would recommend Train Tracker to family and friends.

TrainTracker™ Text

TrainTracker™ Text provides live departure and arrival information for stations, or journeys for today by SMS.

SImply send a text to 84950 with your required station and the service will send you a reply containing arrival and / or departure information for that station.

For example:

text your station name to 84950 to receive details of all the next departures
text ‘arr’ followed by your station name to receive details of all arrivals to that station

View a list of further enquiry options and their responses

Your message sent to 84950 will cost the normal text message rate charged by your operator. Our reply to you will cost 25p including VAT, and will be charged to you by your operator. You are only charged for replies containing departure/arrival information. You will not be charged for error messages.

Contact Centre

Call answering performance for the rolling 12 months to date was as follow.

Number of calls offered: 13,578,803
Number of calls answered: 12,820,263
Percentage of calls answered (PCA): 94.4%
Average Time To Answer calls (ATTA): 21 seconds

Customer Satisfaction

An independent company conducts a continuous survey on customer satisfaction monthly. The latest survey result done between August 09 and October 09 was 89% of our customers would recommend NRE to family and friends.

Accuracy

The world's leading independent mystery shopping company, Taylor Nelson Sofres conducts mystery shop calls to each of our contact centres. For the period covering 1st April 2009 to 10th October 2009 we answered 99.4% of calls correctly on this measure.

National Rail Communication Centre (NRCC)

The NRCC has gone from strength to strength since its humble beginnings in the aftermath of the Hatfield disaster in 2000.

Information during Disruption

The NRC plays a vital role in the NRE operation by acting as a clearing house for service disruption information received from Train Operating Companies, which generally contains railway jargon and acronyms. Editing the TOC message and publishing in a customer-friendly way, the NRCC ensures information reaches passengers in a way they can understand it.
This is presented in the following format:

Problem – the cause of disruption / train or line of route involved
Impact – what the service is doing / amount of delay in minutes
Advice -any alterations to service / what passengers should do

The information is provided through the following channels:

Service Disruption area of the National Rail Enquiries website
Journey Planner Bulletins are applied to relevant journeys (bulletins are pieces of textual information that are attached to either trains, stations or lines of route)
Live Departure Board messages are applied to each station affected by the disruption giving a headline summary of the disruption
Email to the media, ensuring that information being given through the radio and television is consistent with that given by NRE.
Management of real time changes to train schedules in Darwin, the NRE real time database, that feeds the Journey Planner and Live Departure Boards

Engineering Work

When the NRCC receives information about engineering work, they check that the amended services are showing correctly in the Journey Planning systems. Any errors or omissions are fed back to Network Rail and the TOCs to resolve. They then publish a customer-friendly summary of the work enabling passengers to make an informed choice about their travel plans. This is presented in the following format:

Problem - the location of the work/ line of route involved
Impact - any alterations to service / length of extended journey times
Advice - what passengers should do

This information is provided through the following channels:

Service Disruptions channel on the National Rail Enquiries website
Journey Planner Bulletins are applied to relevant journeys (bulletins are pieces of textual information that are attached to either trains, stations or lines of route)

Retail Information

The NRCC is also key to providing reliable, impartial and consistent retail information across all of NRE's channels.