Loco

Today we are pleased to announce the public launch of the first phase of our journey-planning tool.

As lots of you will know, it is currently pretty difficult to successfully plan and book an overland journey, particularly train journeys within Europe. We hope that the journey-planner is a step in the right direction to making that easier. The tool includes location-specific content from Guardian Travel, Qype, and accommodation listings from Hostelbookers.

Whilst the journey-planner doesn’t currently include live timetable or price information, it does clearly outline typical routes for getting to popular destinations from London. You can see the journey on a map and view times of connections for the journeys we have added.

UPDATE 20th April – Based on user feedback we have decided that the ‘create your own journey’ feature is not quite yet ready for public release, so we’re going to keep improving it, and will update again when it’s ready.

We have been working hard developing and testing the tool for some months now. We’re pretty pleased with how far we’ve got, but we’re aware that lots more needs to be done to make it really useful. In software development jargon, we would say that the tool is ‘in beta’ (just like lots of Google web applications were for a long time) and is being developed following ‘release early, release often’ principles. That means that there are more exciting things to come, and that we want your feedback to make the tool better and more useful.

We have our own ideas on what needs to be done to improve the tool, and we’ll be releasing new features on a regular basis (probably every 2-3 weeks). We’re also planning to change the rest of the site substantially, and hope to soon announce some important partnerships. If you are a member of the press who would like to receive a press release about the launch of the journey-planner, or a company who wants to work with us, please get in touch.

Thanks to everyone who has helped the tool get this far, notably Chris Adams, Fred Fix, Jon Leighton and of course the rest of the Loco2 team.

For you web development geeks out there, the journey planner is built in Ruby on Rails on a PostgreSQL database. We plan to open-source code where/when it makes sense, and you can find Loco2 on Github.

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4 responses to “Introducing the journey planner”

1. Bob says:
   April 8th, 2010 at 12:19 am

   Great job guys, keep up the good work!

2. Cath says:
   April 20th, 2010 at 1:01 pm

   hi guys,

   Last time I visited the site it was possible to create your own journey. Since the redesign, I can’t find where to do this on the site.

   The link above to the video guide just takes you through to the journey planner page. You can see the map and previously created journeys but no way of clicking through to create your own.

   Hoping you can get that part of the site up an running again soon. I’ve got exciting plans to train my way to Soundwave in Croatia this summer and this tool would be invaluable!

   Thanks!

3. Jamie says:
   April 20th, 2010 at 1:44 pm

   Hi Cath,

   Thanks for your comment.

   Sorry that the create journey feature is no longer available via the main journey-planner page. Based on user feedback we decided to take it out – lots of people were getting confused and didn’t realise that they needed to add their own connections.

   We thought that it might be more frustrating than useful and so we took it out whilst we work on new functionality behind the scenes. In particular we want to make it possible to edit journey legs after they have been added, as currently the only option is to start the whole journey again, which can be massively annoying.

   If you still want to have a go at creating a journey in light of my comments above then you can do so here:

   http://loco2travel.com/journeyplanner/journeys/new

   You may find this London-Split journey useful when adding your own route:

   http://loco2travel.com/journeyplanner/journeys/416

   Unfortunately it looks like our location tools are having a bit of trouble finding relevant places in Zadar/Petrcane so you may not have too much luck I’m afraid.

   We are working on making this aspect of the journey-planner much easier to use, but it involves some complex software engineering so may take a while. In the meantime, please do keep providing feedback, as it is much appreciated. If you want to get in touch directly, please use the contact link at the bottom of the page.

   Jamie

4. Cath says:
   April 20th, 2010 at 11:10 pm

   Hi Jamie,

   Thanks for responding so quickly. It’s helpful to know what’s happened and the reasons why.

   Thanks also for the link to creating my own journey – it’s great to be able to give it a go.

   Love the rest of the site – something like this has been a long time coming!

   Cheers,
   Cath