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Should Railtrack enter into commercial ventures with individual train operating companies. Well, someone is unhappy with first Group's ‘sweetheart' deal
If you had the journey planner facility on the Railtrack website among your internet ‘Favourites', you may have been surprised when you logged on and were given a direct link totaljourney.com, an on line journey planning and ticket sales facility.
Intrigued, I delved further and found that the new service is a 50/50 joint venture between Railtrack and First Group, claimed to be the first integrated online travel and planning service for the UK .
Joint managing directors of totaljourney.com are John Esam and Elaine Holt. As the head of Railtrack Travel Ltd Esam helped to develop totaljourney.com. Holt is managing director of FirstGroup subsidiary FirstInfo which includes the group's e-commerce sites, including traindirect.co.uk and firstbus.co.uk. She headed the team which initiated, planned and developed totaljourney.com
While starting as a train travel website, totaljourney.com plans to extend into hotel booking, air travel ticket sales and car hire. It is, of course, a direct competitor for TheTrainline.com, Virgin's subsidiary.
In the past I have preferred the Railtrack journey planner to TheTrainline, because when you are planning, as opposed to buying, you don't want to go through all the logging on malarkey. In this respect, totaljourney is a big improvement because, like the low cost airline sites, you don't have to log on until you have chosen your trains and want to buy.
It also seems faster and has a more modern interface than trainline. I particularly liked the Adobe-type floating palettes for calendar and the initiation of a purchase.
But while finding totaljourney useful, I couldn't help feeling that for Railtrack to enter a joint venture with one of its customers could not be right. Railtrack owns the timetable data base, has licence requirements on the published timetable. Surely there was a risk that a sweetheart deal could disadvantage other operators?
Totaljourney.com promises impartial retailing. But with my usual serendipity I came across what looked like discrimination with my first enquiry to the new site.
I wanted to check the train times from Welwyn Garden City to Hull , specifically using Hull Trains. But when I entered the journey, via Kings Cross the message came up ‘This station is not a valid via point for this journey'. Various attempts at forcing the Hull Trains option failed.
Now it is quite feasible that some quirk in the totaljourney.com planner engine or Railtrack database doesn't recognise Hull Trains. So I fought my way into thetrainline.com, entered exactly the same details and was offered a fare for WGC-Hull via Kings Cross using Hull Trains in addition to journeys involving two changes with GNER for the trunk haul.
Then I found that if you log onto the Railtrack Web site you can still access the journey planner. So I entered my WGC-Hull journey, specifying one change, and up came Hull Trains services with no alternatives.
Was I being picky or inventing an improbable journey? For someone whose mobility is impaired, the via Kings Cross option means transfer on the level between platforms at the London terminal into a diesel multiple unit which is fully compliant with the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Regulations.
Obviously, as someone who always assumes cock up rather than conspiracy in the railway, I suspect a glitch in totaljourney's route planning engine. But supposing I was a conspiracy theorist. First Great Eastern is at daggers drawn with Anglia Railways. GB Railways runs Anglia and Hull Trains…
Several complaints about totaljourney.com have been received by Office of the Rail Regulator. TheTrainline confirmed that it has approached the ORR on the basis of a possible unfair practice. Apart from the initial automatic re-routing, there is also concern that the Railtrack journey planner opening page now features an advertisement for totaljourney.com which means that potential ticket purchasers were denied a choice of on line retailers.
When I raised the issue of commercial link between the owner of the timetable data and a train operator, the Strategic Rail Authority denied there was an issue.
Railtrack claimed that the joint venture partnership was the responsibility of Railtrack Group, as opposed to Railtrack plc, ‘which is not regulated'. Not so. T he activities of Railtrack Group PLC are regulated under Condition 13 of the Railtrack plc network licence. However, who needs license conditions when the Regulator has the Competitions Act 1998 in his armoury.
Personally, being a corporatist dinosaur, I don't see why Railtrack didn't do a deal with ATOC to launch a pan-industry nrestickets.com providing impartial journey planning and ticket sales.