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Title: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: JayMac on April 15, 2012, 11:02:07 From the guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/apr/02/rail-timetable-open-data?cat=news&type=article):
Quote How a student used open data to beat national rail enquiries at its own game Opening up rail data has helped Ian Shortman create a new way of negotiating Britain's train system How useful is open government data really? How much can you use to build things that make a difference to people's lives? It turns out that some of the most useful is the least dramatic. Recently, the Association of Train Operating Companies opened up its own data vaults to the world. It effectively means that National Rail Enquiries - which requires a licence to use its data - no longer has a monopoly on rail enquiries. Something which Bristol chemistry undergrad Ian Shortman took advantage of to create trains.im (http://trains.im/) - an open source train timetable service. Why bother? Shortman says it's easy to improve on the official site. "There are a few things that I found really annoying about the railway system. ^ Not knowing the platform beforehand, especially when trying to make a quick connection ^ When getting off before the train terminates, it can be hard to know which train is yours (i.e. it's final destination) on departure boards ^ Not knowing your actual route" So, he took the CIF-formatted data to create a site where you can map out your journey, using OpenStreetMap and where you can easily access a list of all trains between two stations in a day, see routeing and expected intermediate times for entire train journeys and a map of the route. "The interface is simple, not cluttered, and works the same on desktops as mobile applications. With National Rail Enquiries' iPhone app costing ^5, I think this public data should be easily accessible for free." http://trains.im/ Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: Kernow Otter on April 15, 2012, 11:19:40 That's rather good. Added to my bookmarks bar in place of the NRE link !
Well done that man. Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: bobm on April 15, 2012, 11:53:19 There is also http://traintimes.im (http://traintimes.im) and not forgetting http://www.opentraintimes.com/ (http://www.opentraintimes.com/) - they all look and have a similar "feel" about them.
Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: IndustryInsider on April 15, 2012, 11:57:36 It's useful for those that don't have access to the internal railway systems to have details of passing times and headcodes. Good work by both sites - especially the second one.
Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: JayMac on April 15, 2012, 12:10:12 I've met Ian Shortman, the developer of trains.im (http://trains.im/). Very intelligent young chap who's also the webmaster for Friends of Suburban Bristol Railways (http://fosbr.org.uk/).
Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: EBrown on April 15, 2012, 12:58:24 I think both Ian and Thomas are pretty intelligent!
Both websites are very good! Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: Temple Meads on April 15, 2012, 14:08:46 Both sites are top work.
Open Train Times has proven particularly useful to me, pity it doesn't show freight any more though. Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: Rhydgaled on April 15, 2012, 14:45:09 Why do all three sites have a very similar look to them? Is there some condition of using the data that it must look like that? Also, is the bus data used by traveline available? I'd like to see somebody make a site that works a bit like the east coast journey planner (the one I normally use for looking up timetable information, because I find it so much eaiser than NRE), but has bus services in it too. I note that, even though it doesn't know about FGW (Fishguard & Goodwick), Cardigan is apparently a valid location (but because it doesn't do buses, it can't show any services from Cardigan).
Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: EBrown on April 15, 2012, 15:01:45 Why do all three sites have a very similar look to them? Is there some condition of using the data that it must look like that? Also, is the bus data used by traveline available? I'd like to see somebody make a site that works a bit like the east coast journey planner (the one I normally use for looking up timetable information, because I find it so much eaiser than NRE), but has bus services in it too. I note that, even though it doesn't know about FGW (Fishguard & Goodwick), Cardigan is apparently a valid location (but because it doesn't do buses, it can't show any services from Cardigan). They both look like word press themes have been used on their sites. Wordpress makes it quite easy to create reasonable looking webpages; unfortunately, that means traditional web design/coding is dying out.Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: JayMac on April 15, 2012, 15:12:32 Also, Ian Shortman and Thomas Cairns likely know each other. On trains.im Ian acknowledges use of a piece of open source software written by Tom Cairns.
Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: EBrown on April 15, 2012, 15:44:42 Also, Ian Shortman and Thomas Cairns likely know each other. On trains.im Ian acknowledges use of a piece of open source software written by Tom Cairns. That would be the C++ (PHP & SQL) program Tom wrote to parse Network Rail's and ATOCs CIF data feed.Tom is also behind railmiles.org Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: anthony215 on April 15, 2012, 16:53:02 Good I have added both sites to my favourites list.
Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: Richard Fairhurst on April 15, 2012, 21:47:11 Tom has posted here, I believe, though not for several years!
The parsing stuff is seriously impressive. These aren't trivial data formats. Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: devon_metro on April 15, 2012, 23:20:33 Also, Ian Shortman and Thomas Cairns likely know each other. On trains.im Ian acknowledges use of a piece of open source software written by Tom Cairns. That would be the C++ (PHP & SQL) program Tom wrote to parse Network Rail's and ATOCs CIF data feed.Tom is also behind railmiles.org Clever chap, used to be 'swlines' on this forum, not sure if he still monitors it mind you! Bumped into him a few times at uni... Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: EBrown on April 15, 2012, 23:31:27 Also, Ian Shortman and Thomas Cairns likely know each other. On trains.im Ian acknowledges use of a piece of open source software written by Tom Cairns. That would be the C++ (PHP & SQL) program Tom wrote to parse Network Rail's and ATOCs CIF data feed.Tom is also behind railmiles.org Clever chap, used to be 'swlines' on this forum, not sure if he still monitors it mind you! Bumped into him a few times at uni... Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: Ollie on April 16, 2012, 00:19:38 I have a message from Tom:
Quote The websites are all similar because we use Bootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/) - speeds up the process of design and allows the code under the hood to be concentrated on. My site has no framework behind it and it's all done from scratch - I've got a beta version at http://rail.staging.swlines.co.uk/ and welcome any feedback on that If anybody does have feedback feel free to message me and I will pass it on as Tom is unable to post on here. Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: grahame on April 16, 2012, 05:57:04 Both sites are top work. Both websites are very good! Yes, indeed - and they fill very useful holes in the presentation of data. Congratulations to both authors and may I be greedy as ask for more please? ;) - would love to see connections so that I can request (for example) an all day timetable from Chippenham to Salisbury and back. There's a very great deal that Both the sites request feedback and have details on them that you can use to reach the authors. Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: Brucey on April 16, 2012, 09:03:32 I've looked at Tom's parsing script in the past. A great piece of code there, especially considering the rather complex format of the data.
From following him on Twitter, I know that Tom does quite a bit of rail-related programming. I think he may even be doing something for ATOC and/or ITSO at the moment. As for Ian, another great implementation of the timetable data. I'm sure he was in my class for our first year chemistry lectures, didn't know him though. Title: Re: Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012) Post by: IndustryInsider on July 12, 2012, 11:30:13 I kind of found it by accident, but whilst using opentraintimes.com I noticed that you can get details of what allowances are allowed for in each of the schedules.
I've said before that the railway industry has three types of allowances; 'Pathing', 'Engineering' and 'Performance' (the last of which Btline calls 'Slack'!) and if you call up a specific train on opentraintimes.com then selected the detailed site mode on the options tab at the top right-hand side, then the column on the far right gives you these details. I hope I've got these the right way round, but I think: Times marked (1) are pathing allowances. Times marked [1] are engineering allowances. Times marked <1> are performance allowances. They will be marked to the nearest half-minute as per the WTT schedules. Interesting to note that a typical Bournemouth to Manchester XC service has a total of 27 minutes recovery time made up of 17.5 minutes pathing, 7 minutes engineering, and 2.5 minutes performance. You also then need to add any extra dwell time at any of the stations en-route and you will finally come up with the optimum journey time for a given train over a given route. This page is printed from the "Coffee Shop" forum at http://gwr.passenger.chat which is provided by a customer of Great Western Railway. Views expressed are those of the individual posters concerned. Visit www.gwr.com for the official Great Western Railway website. Please contact the administrators of this site if you feel that content provided contravenes our posting rules ( see http://railcustomer.info/1761 ). The forum is hosted by Well House Consultants - http://www.wellho.net |