Great Western Coffee Shop

1. When I went to our local unmanned station to catch my train yesterday, the help point display said that it was having temporary communication problems.

2. I looked up my train via my phone, and it told me it was "delayed".

3. I pressed the help point button and the chap on the far end told me a time my train should arrive, but offered no reason for the delay no made any comment with regard to the certainly of his prediction

4. I texted someone I was due to meet to apologise that I was running late, and learned that my train was stuck (not moving) the other side of a points failure.This was followed up by an estimated time for the engineer to arrive, and update to say that had happened early and to let me know the train was rolling again.

What details should I expect to be able to find routinely at my local station (from which there are around 20,000 journeys a year) on current train running?

1. None
2. The fact that it's late
3. An estimated time with no context or follow up
4. Estimates of timing, with background information and updates

P.S.   I should point out that I did not solicit full information to be texted to me (no. 4), but I was very grateful for it.  And it allowed my to advise other passengers of how to modify their travel plans bearing in mind a connection was going to miss.

I'd probably start with if you can't provide accurate information then don't provide it all. I am so fed up at checking my trains on the web page to see they're on time only to discover that they've not even arrived at the previous station and were never going to be on time.

The web page also seems to be a 8-6 type operation which is poor. This was a problem particularly during the floods when the days information was updated until well past my travel time.

I resent to having to sign up with a 3rd party i.e. Twitter, give them my personal data just to get travel information that's vaguely accurate. The information should be available without needing that.

Going back to the original question I'd settle for no.3 unless its a major incident and going to have a wider impact on my day. No crew available will probably only affect that one train whereas as say, a signal failure perhaps?, could affect subsequent trains.

I'd agree with that: inaccurate or misleading information is worse than having none at all. Noting that 'accurate' does not have to mean 'precise': if '10 minutes late' turns out to be 12, 15 or even 20, that's still reasonably useful information.

As an aside, has anyone else found the design of these 'help points' misleading? It's the big, green button for emergency contact that's the problem. It's good that it's big, but misleading that it's green and that it's so much more prominent and also so close to the button for contacting the switchboard (or whatever it's called) for information. My son's pressed it by mistake or out of childish curiousity at least twice( ::)) when he was little, and I've seen adults do the same.

Indeed.    The really interesting thing is that "10 minutes late" may mean "we're pretty sure it's about 10 minutes late" or it could me "we haven't a clue really - it's late and we're taking a wild stab at 10 minutes", but there's no way of indicating the probabilities and (I suspect) no way that many people would understand a large amount of statistical information or want it anyway!  I am aware of "delayed" which means "stuck and not making progress - haven't a clue when it will be here".