It was one of those days again. It started quite well, and I was even able to leave my customer in Delft at 16:15, which is always a good moment to end my friday and begin my weekend. I use the train and could go from Delft to Rotterdam, and from there to Utrecht, where I would grab my last train to Veenendaal (where I live). With a comfortable 1½ hour trip in front in me, I was feeling quite confident that I could pick up my daughter and have a nice quiet evening with my family.

But when I was halfway, the train came to a stop and mentioned that because of a failure in the railway signalling they would return to Rotterdam again: there was no way forward for this train. This generally signals a complex game of uncertainty and misinformation, These are times where well-informed decissions are important: knowing exactly what routes are possible can save tremendous time: it prohibits traveling into a dead end of the railway network. This is not helped by the employees of the railway services: they generally lack an overview of the real current situation and they are overwelmed by the questions of hundreds of people wanting to go home. And, like with police officers, they are never around when you need them anyway.

For me, it is critical to fetch my own information. The Dutch Railways actually did a great job on this one. They have a mobile website for traintravellers. It provides a travel planner, an up-to-date overview of the current disturbances on the railway network, as well as the specific (real-time) departure times of specific trains from stations. I never realized that that are the things you really need when hell breaks loose on the railways.

It was a very inconvenient place where the failure was: Gouda. Both the trains from Rotterdam and The Hague have to pass through Gouda to get to Utrecht, so traveling to The Hague does not help. That would have been my first option but I had to go further north by train, to Leiden or even Schiphol, to find a connection to Utrecht. Both Leiden and Schiphol have direct trains to Utrecht, and according to the travel planner Leiden would be my best option. At the Rotterdam trainstation people wanting to travel to Utrecht (me!) were advised to go to Schiphol.

Traveling to Leiden would limit my delay to about 2 hours and normally provides a reliable connection to Utrecht. My guess is that they wanted to make sure they had enough capacity: the train from Leiden to Utrecht is a very small one while the train from Schiphol to Utrecht is huge. It is the same train from Rotterdam to Leiden as it is to Schiphol anyway, so I decided to get on the first possibility possible. That train proved to be a challenge in itself: apperantly many people wanted to go to Utrecht. We were literally packed like sardines inside a train. On the positive side, no chance of falling over inside such a train.

When I was near Leiden, packed like a sardine for over half an hour, I decided to do a final check on the railway information. Than I feel really lucky I have mobile internet on my phone and that the Dutch Railways provide good up-to-date information on a mobile optimized site. I feel realy lucky that I did not have to use a laptop to read that information: it takes ages to power up and it would have taken too much space. I do not think my fellow travllers would have given me the room to open up my laptop for that. I think that is one of the perfect cases where a PocketPC outperforms my TabletPC. My K-Jam just fit the space I had to breathe so I was able to use it without annoying too many people, which is a good idea when everybody is tightly packed in a small compartiment without any means of escape. People are not that forgiving when they can hardly breathe and you want some extra space. Many of my fellow travelers were amazed by the compactness and power of the device. They like what they see, and want it as well. I was just amazed by what I read on my screen.

What I found out was devestating. Gouda had become an even more problematic area with a power outage and Utrecht had developped a signalling problem in the central station on its own. That spells trouble. Utrecht Centraal is the bussiest railway station in the Netherlands (the most central one) with 15 platforms and a train leaving about every minute somewhere. When something goes wrong there, it is total havoc on that station for the rest of the day and it will affect the rest of the country. A big failure in Utrecht that lasts longer than two hours generally messes with every train in the Netherlands and causes chaos in the whole Netherlands. Most important for me was that you do not want to be near Utrecht at such a time: chances are that you end up in huge masses of stranded people that will takes ages before they are transported home by taxi (paid for by the dutch railways) in the night.

So, my PocketPC stopped me from going into the dead end of Leiden/Utrecht. But where to go then? Anywhere but Utrecht. Other alternatives are hard to find by hand, but my small friend and it's internet connection helped me out there as well. Amersfoort is a smaller city in the middle of the Netherlands, it has a direct connection to Schiphol by train (without having to go through Utrecht), and has busses to Veenendaal. It takes an hour extra, limiting my delay to three hours, but it is a reliable to go home since it does not depend on a train going from A to B. So all I had to do was remain standing, not much options there anyway, until Schiphol and change to the train to Amersfoort. To make any kind of chance of getting in a decent train I have to know exactly where to be in Schiphol and what time I am supposed to leave. Normally the train tables tell you that. The later is off course questionable at such chaotic times. But then I remembered the Mobile website of the Dutch Railways. I could look up exactly what train would leave when I would arrive, real time and accurate. I could see that there was a train coming in at Schiphol, that went to Amersfoort, it would be daleyed for 10 minutes and would arrive at a totally different platform as usual.

I must say, it helped a lot. Since I exactly knew where to go to, I made the train as one of the first. I was followed by huge masses of people wanting to board the same waiting train, but no stress for me: unlike many other fellow travellers I was on it. And yes, again we were packed like sardines. After some minutes of pushing and moving they closed the doors and the train actually left to Amersfoort. I like Amersfoort. I went to school there. I know that I could cycle home on my foldable bike if I needed to. TomTom on my K-Jam even told me that it would take me about 2½ hours of cycling to get home. It is a good feeling that I at least would get some control over things: I knew I was coming home that evening.

The disadvantage of a delayed train overloaded with pasengers is that it will never make up it's delay. With a 45 minute delay on a 30 minute track, we ended in Amersfoort. Sadly I had missed my bus by 5 minutes and the next one going in 55 minutes. That is not fun. I do not look forward to a 2½ trip cyling in the night, with a backpack of 15 kilo's and an uncomfortable bike. So basically TomTom stopped me in my tracks there: emotions are not a good thing when making decissions. Waiting for the next bus would be an option, but it would requirem me to wait an hour and I would end up with a total delay of 4 hours. Better than cycling, but more than desired. I also knew that there is an old railway line to a place near Veenendaal. It has one train going there every hour. My travelplanner revealed that that train would be on time in Amersfoort and if I got on it, I could catch a train to Veenendaal there, reducing my total delay to "only" 3½ hours. It was the least worse option....

The train indeed arrived on time, only to find out that leaving agin was more difficult: the previous traindriver had ended his shift and his successor was caught in a delayed train. Although it delayed my train for just 10 minutes, it proved to be a killer on my connecting train. I knew this in advance: I could see our prognosed arival time and the prognosed departure time of my connecting train. Normally I would have run for that train, but now I knew it was a lost cause to start with. So, I was stuck again, just 8 kilometers from my home on a station.

This was the moment my battery gave up. That was no wonder: I had been using it since 6:30 for playing music and connecting my laptop to the internet. When the delays started I called my wife a couple of times and used the internet and the MP3 player intensively, so it was no wonder it gave up on me. I was amazed it took so long to give up on me.

Being just 8 kilometers from home, I could have used my foldable bike to drive home. It probably would take me 30 minutes, resulting in a total delay of 4 hours. But I was not known to that part of the city. Without my PocketPC, thus TomTom to guide my way, I inevitably would get lost taking huge amounts of time. The only thing I could do was wait for the next train, resulting in a total of 4½ hours delay on a 1½ hour trip.

My conclusion from this adventure is that my PocketPC has saved me from a lot of trouble and stress: it helped me avoid the dead end in Leiden, it made sure I got a headstart that prevented me being stuck outside a train at Schiphol and it took care of my rerouting in Amersfoort. It provided great info in a perfectly acceptable formfactor, even when squeezed inside a small train compartment like sardines. I see this as the true value of Mobile applications: getting the information to make decissions when you need it, in a simple and compact formfactor.

Jaap van Ekris
in Life on the road
Posted at 00:32:31 UTC