Here, Patrick McDougall, CEO of Nexus Alpha, provides thoughts on a number of topics, from how to improve customer information, how the industry reacted to COVID-19, through to sustainability and how solar powered passenger information signs can help train operators move towards net zero. 

When we started working with rail operators (Regional Railways, Intercity and Network SouthEast in the early days of Nexus Alpha), there was a dearth of information available about service disruption. This is how I remember it, two-and-a-half decades on…

BBC Travel, where this journey started, had been presented by one division of Network SouthEast (Great Eastern) with a printed working timetable, a laminated list of what was titled ‘single needle telegraph codes’, and an operational pager. So, when the pager went off indicating ‘CAPE 1P36’ it was a matter of looking up CAPE (which of course means cancelled – one of the easier ones), and then looking up 1P36 in the correct part of the timetable, to identify which service the 1P36 was (perhaps the ‘1558 London Liverpool Street to Norwich’), and then publishing this on a Ceefax page for the public to view.