Rail ticketing website is running on time
The first stages of a £31m project to develop a single national rail reservation system from about 30 train company systems have...
The project will provide a single web point of contact for rail passengers to book tickets and seats on particular trains.
The project - called the National Reservation System - will run on IBM Websphere on HP Nonstop hardware and will go live on Boxing Day 2004 following a development period including six months of testing.
Because of the organisational issues involved in bringing together so many disparate systems, the Association of Train Operating Companies has formed a governance structure comprising project and programme boards with board-level involvement from member companies, a seven-member suppliers' forum and an expert users group.
Technical design authority Dave Paylor said the main challenge would be in migrating data, especially as this would largely comprise live booking information that needed to be transferred from one system to another.