​At the end of last month, the UK was hit by the weather bomb known as Storm Doris. She brought gusts of wind up to 94mph and left a trail of destruction and disruption in her path including major transport disruption to flights, roads and rail.

So how is this relevant to Thales? Well, Thales solutions were integral to helping passengers re-plan their journeys. For example, visits to the National Rail Journey Planner on the website peaked at 5.25pm when the system managed over 90,000 requests in just five minutes. In total, the platform received 9.4 million journey plan requests compared to 5.3 million on a normal day, through the website, mobile and apps.

 

Being able to plan journeys before setting off as well as during them is a vital element of the industry-wide goal of improving the journey experience for all passengers. Consistent access to reliable, real time information at all stages of a journey is a step change for those who are regular users of the UK’s transport network and infrequent travellers alike. It allows people to see if there are disruptions along their route whilst enabling them to plan alternatives. The National Rail Journey Planner peaked at 1,150 requests per second during the storm and received a total of 39 million requests. On a normal day, the average number of requests is 17 million, thus showing how much this information is relied upon to get people to where they need to be every day, as well as in the wake of a major disruption.

 Shaun Jones, VP for Transportation in the UK says, "I’m proud that our employees and systems managed the challenge that Doris presented, resulting in a significantly higher number of passengers relying on us for up-to-date critical travel information.”

“It was a busy day for our systems but good to see that in challenging circumstances we can deliver real time information to our customers and their passengers ensuring everyone can get home safely.” said John Edwards, Head of Application Services.
 
The National Rail Journey Planner is powered by Darwin, a Thales solution that provides reliable, real time information to passengers to help them plan their journeys. Darwin also provides information on platform departure boards and across all 2,000 customer information system enabled stations. As well as journey planning, it also offers ticket sales, real time information, fares information and a range of rail related information to passengers. It is the definitive source of customer information for all passenger rail services on the National Rail network in England, Wales and Scotland.

Thales’s transportation business in the UK has developed and operated Darwin since 2003 and currently there are over 1 billion journey planner enquiries per year. There are over 3.5 million downloads of the smart phone app, allowing 17 million people to use the service in 2015.