Customer service on British trains is excellent. It only takes a few minutes to claim Delay Repay if you're delayed more than 15 minutes, and you can even set it up to do it automatically for you. If your last train back home for the night is cancelled at 1am, you can message the company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to sort you out with a taxi for a distance like London to Cambridge.
I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.
> that won't even go into the centre of our capital city
Is Euston not the centre? Where all the other trains from the north-west come into, and literally on the same road as Kings Cross St Pancras? Plus Old Oak Common is going to be an interchange with the Elizabeth Line.
People also miss the fact that a big reason why HS2 is being built is to take load off of the West Coast Main Line, which is running at full capacity at the moment. There's no room to run additional services. Even though some unfortunate compromises have been made, this will still massively benefit parts of the North because they'll be able to get more frequent services once the line is no longer clogged up by trains from London.
Passenger rights are very good in the UK. It's easy to claim Delay Repay, where you get 25% refund after a 15 minute delay, 50% refund after 30 mins and 100% refund after 60 mins. Other train operators are obliged to help you get where you need to go if the company you intended to travel with has cancelled your trains, or you've missed a connection due to a previous train you were on being delayed.
I've had the last train out of central London for the night cancelled at about 1am and you can just message the train company on social media and they'll pay £100+ to get you a taxi all the way to somewhere like Cambridge.
Also, not sure how it is in other countries, but in the UK, everything is entirely open data. You can go to a site like https://map.signalbox.io/ to see a live map of every train in the UK, and sites like Realtime Trains let you get all the details about every train (eg. https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/search/simple/gb-nr:KGX)
Almost all the traffic on the internet goes to one of like, five companies. They're the ones psychologically experimenting on your kids and intentionally making their services addictive and mental illness-inducing. The other 99% of the internet is still mostly fine. If you simply blocked access to the top 1% most visited websites, I suspect that would solve most of the issues people see with "the internet".
Build wholesome small-scale services just for you and the people you care about. I run a little private photo-sharing/messaging service for me and my friends, along with other nice things like a Jellyfin server for media. There's just no incentive to introduce anything bad like you inevitably get with massive for-profit companies. And, these corners of the web are never realistically going to be subject to all the recent regulation like the Online Safety Act, if it's just a small invite-only space.
We shouldn't have tens of millions of people on one platform arguing over what sort of content should and shouldn't be allowed, ruled by big tech oligarchs. Build an area of your own that you can share with your friends!
Unfortunately I think the mobile app store model significantly increases the barriers to random people making their own things. You can teach a young teenager to make a little website that they can stick on GitHub Pages and show off to their friends in an afternoon. A mobile app? Not so much. Especially if it requires possibly buying a Mac to run XCode, and then an Apple Developer account (maybe not that expensive if you're in the tech industry, but if you're a kid who just wants to try it out and show stuff to your friends, it's a pretty big barrier + there's the id verification stuff). It's unsurprising that such a small amount of the software for iOS is free/open-source, compared to platforms where the costs to develop are lower.
I consistently find railway workers to be some of the most helpful and approachable people I have to interact with, which is remarkable given the sort of people they have to put up with. I think the sort of person you'll be speaking to certainly depends on the part of the country you're in though - in Scotland and Wales, I've seen people who've been let off for having a ticket that expired several days prior, and staff are happy to have a friendly chat if the train isn't too busy.