Bristol student beats NRE at its own game. (the guardian 02/04/2012)

[whole diary]

[Ollie]

I have a message from Tom:

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.

[grahame]

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 must should be done early in the next franchise and in possible wider organisational and fare revisions to produce through timetables, through fares and through ticketing from "A" to "B" where "A" and "B" are both on the public transport network, but not necessarily railway stations.  And work such as Tom's and Ian's shows the capabilities and the people out there who are capable of doing it.

Both the sites request feedback and have details on them that you can use to reach the authors.

[Brucey]

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^» (Association of Train Operating Companies See - here) 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.

[IndustryInsider]

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^▸ (Working Time-Table) schedules.  Interesting to note that a typical Bournemouth to Manchester XC^▸ (Cross Country Trains (franchise)) 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.