Swiss railway prowess
Yesterday, wanting to find out the platform of an arriving train (stations are good at displaying departures, but don’t seem to consider arrival information worth showing), I fired up the “SBB Business” mobile application of the Swiss railways which I purchased some time ago:
The results are impressive: one can, they tell us, ride from Paris to Zurich — about 500 kilometers or 300 miles — in 56 minutes by leaving at 17:02. Wow! No wonder the entry displays (on the right) the graphical symbol for the highest possible expected passenger load, in both first and second class. With such a speed I would flock to that train too!
Nonsense of course. The TGV is fast, at least in the French part (from Basel to Zurich they seem to make it as slow as possible to prove some point), but it still takes four hours and three minutes. I have no idea where the program got the information it displays.
Trying to tap the “earlier” or “later” buttons does not help much, since what you get (consistently repeated if you keep trying, and confirmed again one day later) is this screen:
No clue what “F1” means.
Whatever software solutions the SBB uses, I am not impressed. Of course, they are welcome to ask for my suggestions.
Eiffel Software
Home page at ETH
Informatics Europe
LASER summer school
Propulsion Academy
Didn’t verify it, and assuming arrival times in ZUE are correct – might the departure time be taken from the first domestic station? That would make some sense, as, in contrast to fahrplan.sbb.ch, train runs coming from hafas/xml web service seem to contain the domestic part only.
Actually (as discovered by André Sintzoff and checked through the non-mobile SBB web site, which seems to return the correct results for this query) the schedule shown is for trains from Berne to Zurich.
The trains from Paris do not go through Berne, so there is no simple application other than a bug in the mobile application, which leads it to confuse Berne and Paris — the capitals of two different countries…