Some say “it’s better to have no twitter account at all than an inactive one“, but I’m not sure that Southern feel that way, as two twitter accounts with their name on are not promoting the rail company in very good light.
Firstly, @southerntrains is mostly harmless narrating the life of a commuter in south London, with tweets such as
“Cancellations at charing x so missed my connection at London bridge again“
and
“London overground have put one bench back at Norwood, where there was 4. So am still standing up.”
Then there’s @southern_trains, which is far more motivated and often hilarious. As well as posting it’s own reviews on the trains service
it mainly focuses on retweeting the cream of other people’s comments, some of whom aren’t aware that it isn’t an official account:
and
“Exceptional service, @Southern_Trains. You are on time. It is an exception.“
If you use Southern for your commute, you may like to follow these accounts to at least share your frustrations…
One of the many applications on my iPhone is MotionX-GPS with gives you a lot of information from the GPS receiver built into the phone. It gives you proper long/lat coordinates for your position, calculates speed, direction and altitude and most interestingly can track your route over time and email you a Google Maps link and Google Earth file.
As I’m commuting further than I used to and am above ground for some of it I tested out the tracking on the train from London Victoria to East Croydon. It lost the signal a few times along the route (bridges and steep embankments didn’t help) but over all did a good job, you can view the route here: maps.google.co.uk.
