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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.
In my experience, the Turkish
State Railways website does
not work in any web browser
except Microsoft Internet Explorer,
which means that 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 loaded down
with databasing and javascript that
it's often difficult to figure out
how to get the information you want,
and the English is of little help.
A sample:
To
access train information, where to
travel Arrive to area, please select
from map. Then select your arrive point
from the list.
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.
Luckily 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 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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