Contented customers
Improving the user experience to make rail travel more appealing and competitive
You and a colleague are traveling cross country for work. Before you leave your house, you bring up an app that plots out your route, booking a driverless cab to take you to the train station, and the train and metro that will take you to your client’s office. Once you arrive at the station, a hidden scanner detects your phone‘s unique identifier, proving you have a ticket, and you waltz onto the train.
On the train, you enter a ‘pod’ that you booked in advance. At the push of button, an acoustic screen built around your seat creates a private meeting room where you and your colleague can do your weekly catch up in privacy. You set the lighting and air conditioning to your perfect comfort level via your phone.
Unfortunately, the train stops unexpectedly. But it’s of some comfort that the train’s built in AI, accessible via your phone, can bring up the details of the delay, the steps currently being taken to remediate it, and predicted remediation time based on past experience. No matter, you let your taxi and client know the updated arrival time, and use the time to pop on your VR glasses and join a virtual meeting – with no interruption to the connection – where your engineering team in India give you a hands-on walk through of the latest product design.
We are, of course, quite a long way off from this reality, but the technology to make it happen is mostly already available. The work now is to integrate, test and certify this technology.
Why take the train anyway? The competition problem
The first question might be, ‘why bother with all these expensive upgrades?’. Though many operators are nationalized, railways still operate in a transport marketplace where they compete with many forms of transport. Rail is often just one of the various available options. It struggles to compete with cars for convenience and planes for speed. But it can be better at both of these than it is now, whilst also offering greater comfort and – critically in a busy world – the gift of time to be productive as passengers sit uninterrupted in a comfortable, connected seat. It is also far more environmentally friendly.
We reckon that, when the journey time is roughly ±30% more than the length of a car of plane journey, most customers could be convinced to choose rail as an option. Trains can also get you from city center to city center, which isn’t true for planes, and can be highly challenging for cars, due, for example, to traffic congestion and the logistics of parking. We also envision a model where a train traveler can seamlessly rent private transport (eg. electric car, electric bike) for the ‘last mile’ to their destination.
By leaning into its natural benefits, and getting better at making the entire journey smoother, trains can attract many more customers, which is good for rail companies and good for carbon emissions.
But what will it take to achieve this?
The user experience
Comfort will need to be at least equivalent to car travel, though rail can (and should) aim higher. Though a staple of good service in days gone by, the food and drink cart is not as important today - a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and better food options at stations.
Instead, here is what rail users care about.
Comfort
“Freezing”, “cramped”, “people chattering in the quiet carriage”. These are just some of the complaints routinely found on rail review sites.
Much of this could be solved quite easily. In many cases today, a train’s onboard heating and cooling systems are set before departure and cannot be modified once the train is in transit. This isn’t good enough for today’s passengers. They need localized heating and cooling options, and windows that, on demand, can create electronic blinds to protect against excessive sunlight.
Seats may require a rethink too. These seats need legroom and comfortable, ergonomic designs - though this is more of a requirement for longer trips, and less so for short stop metro journeys. All seats require USB-A and USB-C sockets and power outlets.
On board privacy and value added services
For many passengers, one of the major downsides of public transport might be having to deal with other members of the public. What if you didn’t have to (or, at least, not as much)?
The idea isn’t entirely new. First class carriages and sleeper trains have offered enclosed carriage spaces for decades, and offered additional services. Airlines have some excellent offers here for those who can afford it - some first class ‘suites’ come with everything from HD screens, shower suites, luxurious beds and high speed internet.
Few trains are likely to offer such extravagance, but simpler options could provide the privacy needed for a private meeting or conversation, and attract a premium, particularly from business travelers where travel eats into their working day. This would, ideally, be a private environment - a kind of cocoon or pod. Physical barriers could descend to create a ‘room’, or speakers use noise cancellation technology (similar to what is found in some high end headphones) to decrease background noise. A rail operator in Norway offers a carriage where passengers can book a private ‘phone booth’ via an app to take phone calls (familiar to those who use modern shared office space), which can be unlocked at the pre-booked time via a QR code.
Real time, high quality connectivity
Then there is connectivity. For a comfortable journey, users want to stream HD films and join meetings. The bandwidth required to allow, say, 1000 train passengers to simultaneously stream video with a high quality of service (QoS) is significant. That could increase exponentially if real-time VR takes off.
Current systems fall well short, but this kind of connectivity is the target of 5G FRMCS, or Future Railway Mobile Communication System. Like other 5G networks, FRMCS operates through a series of cell towers that cover geographic areas. These towers connect to devices on trains and along tracks, enabling continuous communication even at high speeds. This infrastructure supports both the uplink (from train to tower) and downlink (from tower to train) communications essential for railway operations. That means it can offer high-speed data transmission, low latency, and the ability to connect many devices simultaneously.
It also offers much greater security, since it is a fully digital system that brings much greater control over how data is encoded and transmitted, allowing more robust security mechanisms to be put into place vs today’s analog systems.
Nonetheless, this is a technically complicated upgrade and so the transition will occur gradually over several years to allow for rigorous testing, certification, and integration without disrupting current railway operations.
Flexibility, reliability and resilience when taking the train
Ultimately, we must tackle perceptions of unreliability in rail by making trains more reliable. We can do this by building increased resilience and flexibility into trains – making them better able to tackle the incidents that will be inevitable, regardless of how technologically sophisticated trains become.
Today, timetables and routes are fixed. This is what you can see printed in the stations for the next six months, or via the operator’s app as you book tickets online.
Tomorrow, we may imagine that additional trains or reduced service could be done ‘on the fly’, meaning, for example, that more trains go to and from a city on the day of a major sporting event at that city – or reducing train frequency when there is a bank holiday.
Doing so means higher flexibility and more capability management (also requiring crews to be more flexible to react to fluctuating demand). When routes are compromised due to traffic or an incident, there should be a way to divert a train from its original plan, take a secondary route (deviation) and transport people with less disruption than an outright cancellation.
The goal is a train that continues its route to the destination regardless - one that never stops operating completely, even, for example, when no power is available on the overhead catenary, or the original route isn't available. In other words: a journey should never be canceled (ie. passengers have other options, like bus transfers in worst case scenarios), delays are limited to less than 10 minutes, and service is frequent (eg. one train at least every 20 mins). If train integrity is high enough, a single failure could, ideally, never prevent the passengers from getting to their destinations within a few minutes of their planned arrival.
All of this requires extensive redundancy and increased support for operation in emergencies or degraded modes of working, a complete failure analysis of train operations to better understand (and mitigate) everything that could possibly go wrong, and highly connected services, supported by connectivity everywhere.
A better experience from start to finish
Finally, there is everything around the journey that makes it seamless end-to-end, from the moment you book a ticket, to getting to the train, getting on it, and arriving at your destination.
A train app could allow you to book the entire journey based on your preferences, eg hiring a bike for a short journey to the station in the sun, or an Uber for a longer one in the rain. A single ticket could give you access to everything. Theoretically, there is no need to scan at all on trains, a device at the station could detect your phone’s identifier and link it back to your journey, or a camera linked to your phone’s face ID algorithm could detect you as you walk by – though, obviously, data privacy would need to be very carefully managed here.
This has an additional security benefit; people can always jump barriers – London’s transport operator TfL says people who jump the barriers cost it £150 million per year. An identifier based system could provide a clear view of who has paid and who hasn’t, and allow them to be directly approached, or barred in future.
This holistic journey approach also extends to updates on board. Customers don’t want to be kept in the dark when things go wrong. A large proportion of complaints are related to punctuality and reliability - 2023 data from the UK Department for Transport [5] finds that a lack of punctuality and reliability were the main cause of complaints. Being made to wait without an adequate explanation can make the situation worse.
As in the example at the beginning of this article, this could take the form of a ‘live view’ of the train's location on an accessible website, backed by an AI chatbot that can quickly and accurately provide answers to questions like ‘what has caused the current delay?’ or ‘what the best route to X is if I miss my connecting train?’ or warn customers if they may be running late.
This notion of a joined up journey needs significant integration behind the scenes. This requires integration between different transport companies to allow multi-modal routes to be suggested based on criteria, booked in one payment, and payments split between companies. Many booking sites already allow train tickets that span more than one train network, so adding in bike, bus and taxi companies doesn’t seem farfetched.
It also needs backend systems in the cloud that can track a single identifier – say an app or a credit card number – through the journey, so the user can be validated at each checkpoint without needing separate tickets for each. Finally, it needs all information systems from train locations to maintenance systems to be connected and fed into purpose-built analytics software, and presented through well-designed user interfaces (likely harnessing Generative AI) such that the user can access the information they need, when they need, in a way that is meaningful to them.
Frontline employees reporting a superior experience can also have an impact on customer satisfaction. Our research reveals [6] that 89% of frontline employees say their organizations have improved their employee experience, leading to an indirect positive impact on customer experience. Additionally, 82% say that their organizational leadership listens to and learns from employee interactions with customers to improve the customer experience.
We believe that trains can remain relevant and competitive well into the future, and play a major part in the move to MaaS (Mobility as a Service) - an aspirational vision of future transport that “integrates various forms of transport and transport-related services into a single, comprehensive, and on-demand mobility service… one that aims to be the best value proposition for users, societies, and the environment“ (the MaaS Alliance) [7].
Expectations are rising, service must follow
The continual rise in passenger expectations of comfort and convenience cannot be ignored. Rail also has some stiff competition; other industries are working to make their modes of transport more attractive.
But rail also has a lot of things working in its favor. It is generally cheaper, more ubiquitous and more comfortable than air travel, and it provides more space than air, car or bus travel. In most cases – especially when electrified – it is far greener and emits less per passenger than most of its competition.
In some cases, its uptake is held back by perceptions of unreliability, crowded or cramped conditions, inflexible ticketing and a lack of amenities. Broadly speaking, these are all things that can be fixed with some of the interventions outlined above.
Ultimately, travelers are more likely to choose rail over other forms of transport if:
There is frequent service - including early mornings and late evenings - and this service is consistently reliable
Trains offer high quality connectivity and comfort - and there is the privacy to work or relax
There is a clear green incentive to travel by rail
The first and last mile are easy to organize, book and pay for
There is confidence in the reliability of trains and their ability to easily overcome incidents
Today’s rail industry has a chance to make itself more appealing and grab a larger share of the market. It will do so by embracing technology and IT architecture that will allow it to deliver a connected, joined up and comfortable service.
