Transit strikes are not unknown in Britain, though they aren't as common as they were in the old days. Jackie and I are vacationing in London at the moment and had planned side trips to Oxford to see friends and to Lewes to attend a couple of opera performances at the Glyndebourne Festival. Our travel days coincided with not one but two prospective industrial actions, and, as usual, it was difficult to get reliable and useful updates from news media -- or indeed from railroad employees, at least one of whom was a positive volcano of misinformation.
Strikes were likely both on the London Underground (which would be completely shut down for a day and a half) and on several rail lines (which might or might not suffer cancellations and delays). We needed to know whether we'd be able to get a train from Oxford to London or whether we'd have to take the bus in heavy traffic; how we'd get back to our lodgings once we'd arrived in London; and whether the following morning we'd get to Lewes at all without hitchhiking in our opera duds.
What I did was follow the Twitter feeds of all relevant companies: @nationalrailenq for general train information; @TfLTravelAlerts for London Underground updates; and the two train operators whose routes we were hoping to travel on -- @FGW and @SouthernRailUK. All of these were tweeting like mad, with a helpful flow of news about the effects of the strikes, interlaced with day-to-day travel alerts, such as "Trains between Guildford and Havant are being delayed by up to 20 minutes due to signalling problems" and "Trains are expected to be able to call at Battersea Park from the start of service tomorrow following electrical supply problems." Great for train-spotters as well as anxious travelers. At one point, I was still uncertain about our evening train from Oxford to London; I tweeted directly to @FGW and in a matter of minutes had received a specific (and accurate) answer to my question: they must have a very busy social media desk.
In the end everything worked out, even though we had to walk to Victoria Station during the Underground strike -- which we did in beautiful weather. (It wouldn't have been fun if we'd been carrying much more than a laptop, a toothbrush and a change of socks.) But having good and very timely information took much of the stress out of what could have been a nerve-racking few days.
Would this work as well in other European countries? A spot check of train operators' feeds suggests that some but not all pay the same attention to Twitter or as proactive as companies in Britain. Some respond to passenger queries, some just dish out advertising; some are next to useless. Here's a list for popular destinations:
Austria @unsereOEBB; France @SNCF; Belgium @NMBS_SNCB_BMO; Denmark @omDSB; Germany @DB_Info; Italy @fsnews_it; Netherlands @NS_online; Norway @nsb_no; Portugal none, but see https://www.cp.pt/passageiros/en/; Spain @renfe; Sweden @SJ_AB; Switzerland @RailService
