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I love Turkish trains and
have ridden them happily for 40 years.
The Turkish State Railways
website used to be among the most informative
and easy to use of Turkish transport
websites (which, admittedly, is not
saying much, as most Turkish websites
have more dancing-baloney Flash graphics
and javascript jitters than useful
information.)
Unfortunately, in late
2007 the Turkish State Railways "improved" its website so
that now it is much more difficult
to use and to find information on
trains. The aim was to enable online
reservations, but in the process they
made it nearly impossible to figure
out which train you wanted to make
a reservation for.
The Turkish
State Railways website does
not work in any web browser
except Microsoft Internet Explorer,
and even with that browser much of
it does not work correctly.Anyone using Firefox,
Safari, Camino, or any of
the several dozen other browsers available
may be out of luck. (This is not unusual
for websites designed with Microsoft
software.)
Though—admirably—the TCDD
website includes
an English-language section,
the entire website is so clunky and
loaded down with databasing, javascript
and Flash animation that it's often
difficult to figure out how to get
the information you want, and the English
is often just gibberish. A sample:
To
access train information, where to
travel Arrive to area, please select
from map. Then select your arrive point
from the list.
Here's another one:
Caution/ attention Internet ticket
now ONLY Desk Information on the
step You can take your ticket form
the sales posts you can see ( NO INTERNET
SALES BESIDES THE SALES POSTS)
Huh?
Pages take a long time to load, and
are often inscrutable after loading,
yielding very little information. Sometimes
it just doesn't work at all, and you're
simply out of luck.
Even if you get it to work, after
awhile the page "times out" and simply
disappears, so if you succeed in actually
getting the page you want, act
quickly to retrieve the information
you want before it vanishes and you have to
start all over and wait for each page
to load again.
The July 2009 update to
the website put some schedule and route
information on simple pages accessible
to all browsers (click
here), so it
may now be possible to get more information
on trains—all in Turkish only—, but
I was unable to obtain reliable information
on fares.
For
those traveling to or from rail destinations
outside of Turkey, schedules
to foreign destinations have
(so far) maintained the HTML simplicity
and accessibility of the old TCDD website:
Trains
to/from Europe (Greece,
Bulgaria, Romania)
Trains
to/from the Middle East (Iran,
Syria, Iraq)
I'm glad the TCDD is better at operating
a railroad than at designing a website.
I will
do my best to provide train information
on TurkeyTravelPlanner.com,
but of course I cannot guarantee the
accuracy of any train info here. That
responsibility lies with the Turkish
State Railways.
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