It's a fact of life that trains are late. Things break, weather happens, if you're a UK commuter you learn to roll with it. Most of the time, there's a long wait for no reason in the middle of nowhere and no one's any the wiser until things get moving again.
During last week's "snow event" I discovered that a guy called Ben Smith has set up a Twitter service which feeds in travel updates from each of our railway companies. When the National Rail and Southern websites had all-but-broken under the strain of people working out if they could wing a day off, the Twitter stream - which is an unofficial service powered by the BBC Backstage's travel feeds - held up brilliantly and was supplemented manually by information sent in by stranded travellers.
Realising the utility of his creation under challenging conditions, Ben is now experimenting with automatic crowd-sourced updates. He's using Yahoo Pipes to monitor the Twitter accounts of people following his service for a certain message format and retweet the results through the travel feeds. I read about this on Monday morning, and by Monday night was unfortunately in a position to try it out. Stuck at Lewes with rain lashing down and a warning of flooding ahead, I sent in a couple of messages as my train was diverted and by the time I was on the replacement bus service I could see the updates coming back through the Southern feed using Tiny Twitter on my phone.
Obviously there is potential for mis-use and mis-information through such a service but, as a commuter to London of several years (I hesitate to calll myself "seasoned" as there are people who have been doing it for decades), this feels like the kind of application that Twitter, if it was not invented for, will truly come into its own for.
You can find details of all Twitter streams available - there is one for each of the 25 UK rail companies - at Ben Smith's UK Trains wiki.