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(The following story by Lauren Otis appeared on The Packet website on July 15.)

PRINCETON, N.J. — Commuters know the drill well: You won’t make your regular train, and can’t remember when other trains depart, so you have to root around for a paper schedule that you may or may not have remembered to bring with you, sometimes with only minutes to spare.

But what if the schedule was always at your fingertips, loaded electronically right onto your cell phone?

That’s what Yuriy Yakimenko wondered when he began business school at Rutgers in the fall of 2007, and began regularly commuting to Newark on the Northeast Corridor line from his home in Hamilton.

Mr. Yakimenko, 35, a native of the Ukraine who has lived and worked in the Princeton area for the past 10 years, set about creating a new electronic service that enables train commuters to go paperless by loading their train schedule onto their mobile phones.

”Why would you carry your paper schedule when you can have a much better one all the time on your phone?” Mr. Yakimenko said. “It is far more convenient than having a paper schedule.”

His service is different from other travel schedule and advisory services because a user’s cell phone doesn’t need to have wireless Internet access to load and run it, and it doesn’t rely on text message updates and incurred texting charges, according to Mr. Yakimenko.

Users can go to his Web site — www.trainlogic.net — and download the software and schedules they want onto their computers, and transfer the data to their phone via easily purchased data transfer cables. They are asked to supply an e-mail so Mr. Yakimenko can establish a database of users, but also so he can notify them when a new schedule is released, every three or four months.

”Most people don’t know you can put third-party software onto your phone,” Mr. Yakimenko said. His program and the schedules take up little space on the devices, he added. “Internet access can help because if you have it you can update your schedules directly to your phone,” he said.

Mr. Yakimenko did not come to the project without experience in transportation logistics. Prior to seeking an MBA in finance he worked for ALK Technologies in Princeton, a transportation software and technology firm. Currently on summer break, he is able to devote time to developing the system, he said.

”I’m covering quite extensively the eastern United States at this point,” Mr. Yakimenko said, including NJ Transit, the Long Island Rail Road, and SEPTA lines. He has also loaded train schedules for the Chicago and Dallas areas and some from Florida. Ultimately, he would like to build a system from which commuters and train riders could access schedules from all over the country.

”The idea is eventually to make it work as a single network,” he said.

With his software’s trip planner function, train riders can combine schedule data from various rail lines, line up connections, and create a single network schedule for themselves, Mr. Yakimenko said.

Mr. Yakimenko is still figuring out in what way he can make the enterprise a profit-making one, and is undecided whether he might generate income through advertising or charging subscriber fees. Right now the product is free for anyone who wants to try it.

Among kinks he is still ironing out, Mr. Yakimenko noted that despite the ability to obtain schedules and process them electronically so users can upload them, doing so is still a time consuming process for him.

And then there’s the biggest hurdle: getting harried commuters to take notice of and adopt the mobile phone tool. Mr. Yakimenko says he has gone to local train stations and distributed fliers about his product in the morning to commuters, with limited interest or success.

”I have to admit, I have mixed reactions because when you approach someone in the train station who is in a hurry early in the morning, they are not in a very good mood because they didn’t sleep well,” he said.