Changes to our data feed may cause a few ripples in a week or two.

[whole diary]

[grahame]

Coffee Shop live data feeds ( MRUG^» (Melksham Rail User Group - site) ones too ) come from several sources, and have done for years.   The providers are pretty good at keeping these stable, but over time they get long in the tooth and a new generation is provided - sometimes with compatability issues or feature that hardly anyone used removed.   When using these feeds, it's known to be a risk and it's known that recoding / refactoring will be needed from time to time - even occasional loss of facilities.

I have been alerted to changes in one of our feed sources at the end of this month; one of the changes is probably for the better (it means that very hard work done years ago on something becomes trivial in a replacement - I hate throwing code out!) but a second change is causing concern as I think we've been using something that few others have.  Please, regular users, just note this concern - you may see some "funnies" at the start of next month which are NOT April fool jokes. I will keep this thread posted; main forum operation should NOT be effected.

[grahame]

Many "Tiger" data feeds are updating during next week - main site moving from http://iris2.rail.co.uk/tiger/ to https://tiger.worldline.global/home and addresses within the new site are different too. Also some welcome changes on the displays - compare top left and bottom right on the image below. Remaining feeds move in the early summer.  Big thanks to the tech support team there - a couple of email pointers have saved me hours and alerted me to what needs doing further on a June timescale.

Our clickable map at the top left (when you drill down to individual stations) gives you a wide variety of links to real time systems and (this morning) I have added some new Tiger feeds under "new WebTIS" links.  The old ones remain, now under "old WebTIS" so you can compare for a few days and to help anyone else who's updating their links.  As an example - the URL http://new.passenger.chat/map.html?stn=BWT will get you to the sample page for Bridgwater.

Tiger Image - Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK^▸ (United Kingdom),
CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0> via Wikimedia Commons.

From a quick look, the new station set available under Tiger is the same as the old station set - but that's not something that's been confirmed.  Please let me know if you find any broken links or any other Tiger stations we don't link to (GB^▸ (Great Britain) - I know that Tiger also covers Northern Ireland and we don't have the links in for that!)

[paul7575]

Old Tiger didn’t include SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) stations, but new Tiger does.   It always looked quite good when you glanced through the list looking for GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) stations, but for some reason they never really covered the former Southern region.

It will now have much more coverage than before, and can presumably be a better recommendation for general use...

Paul 

[grahame]

Old Tiger didn’t include SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) stations, but new Tiger does.   It always looked quite good when you glanced through the list looking for GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) stations, but for some reason they never really covered the former Southern region.

It will now have much more coverage than before, and can presumably be a better recommendation for general use...

Paul 

Ah - thank you - yes; holes such as Salisbury being filled.  Will need to generate new list ...

[stuving]

Old Tiger didn’t include SWR^» (South Western Railway - about) stations, but new Tiger does.   It always looked quite good when you glanced through the list looking for GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) stations, but for some reason they never really covered the former Southern region.

It will now have much more coverage than before, and can presumably be a better recommendation for general use...

Paul 

SWR and some other TOCs^▸ (Train Operating Company) were not on the old Tiger because they generated the CIS^▸ (Customer Information System) feeds in their own systems. Tiger is part of the industry-wide system directly linked to Darwin, all run by ATOS. That bit of ATOS was spun off as Worldine in 2019 by a rather odd-looking process of ATOS giving most of its shares to the other shareholders - maybe that makes sense in France!

I guess the physical host system has also been split off from the rest of ATOS, and we are seeing the switch across to that. At the same time the latest batch of TOCs to migrate onto the common feed source is included.

[grahame]

Thanks, yes, that looks like it fills a few of the gaps

Stations Name	Information	Departures
Main TransWilts line Swindon to Southampton via Melksham	.	.
Swindon	*	*
Chippenham	*	*
Melksham	*	*
Trowbridge	*	*
Westbury	*	*
Dilton Marsh	*	*
Warminster	*	*
Salisbury	*	*
Dean	*	*
Mottisfort and Dunbridge	*	*
Romsey	*	*
Redbridge	*	*
Millbrook	*	*
Southampton Central	*	*
Southampton Airport	*	*
Eastleigh	*	*
Chandlers Ford	*	*
Onward to Portsmouth	.	.
Fareham	*	*
Cosham	*	*
Fratton	*	*
Portsmouth and Southsea	*	*
Portsmouth Harbour	*	*
Onwards to Weymouth	.	.
Frome	*	*
Castle Cary	*	*
Yeovil Pen Mill	*	*
Maiden Newton	*	*
Dorchester West	*	*
Upwey	*	*
Weymouth	*	*
Onwards to Bath and Bristol	.	.
Bradford-on-Avon	*	*
Bath Spa	*	*
Oldfield Park	*	*
Keynsham	*	*
Bristol Temple Meads	*	*
Onwards to London	.	.
Didcot	*	*
Reading	*	*
London Paddington	*	*

There are a number of inconsistencies in that need individual sorting out - typically where a station is known by two names ("Swindon" and "Swindon (Wilts)" for example), a case of different capitalisation and one case of a misspelling on the new site so I suspect there will be odd bugs to fix.  Overall, though , really good to have lots of new stations!

[bobm]

If you are in touch with the developers, here is one bug I have spotted.

When a train arrives at a station it is due to call at the last report changes from "Between X and Y" to "No report".  On the old system it updated to "Arrived at (name of station)".

[eightonedee]

When a train arrives at a station it is due to call at the last report changes from "Between X and Y" to "No report".  On the old system it updated to "Arrived at (name of station)".

Yes, that's a particularly worrying flaw. This used to happen on one of the in-station systems (sorry - after a year's enforced absence from commuting I can't remember which, but I think it was the lineside overhead dot-matrix signs when they up-graded the "walking writing" along the middle), and can cause considerable alarm!

[grahame]

Tiger is part of the industry-wide system directly linked to Darwin, all run by ATOS. That bit of ATOS was spun off as Worldine in 2019 by a rather odd-looking process of ATOS giving most of its shares to the other shareholders - maybe that makes sense in France! ....

Silly, off topic question - does ATOS stand for anything?   I too have tended to capitalise it in the past which makes it look like an abbreviation but I don't know what for and elsewhere it's written as Atos .... no clues at https://atos.net/en/company-profile or ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atos

Rosco is a chap I knew at college (or could have done!) ... ROSCO^» (Rolling Stock Owning Company - about) (or RoSCo) is a Rolling Stock Company ...

STAG^▸ (Severn Tunnel Action Group) is the Severn Tunnel (Junction?) Action Group (or Scottish Transport Appraisal Guidance - GRIP^▸ (Guide to Railway Investment Projects) add on to make it even more complicated) ... but stag is an adult male deer!

[ChrisB]

Likely to be in French if it does stand for anything, but it looks as though it doesn't.

[Lee]

ATOS is actually AtoS, and stands for Atos Origin to SIS. This came about as the result of the 2011  acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions and Services by Atos Origin.

The original Atos was created in 1997 from the merger of two IT service companies, Axime and Sligos. It then became Atos Origin in 2000, following the merger between Atos and Origin.

[grahame]

ATOS is actually AtoS, and stands for Atos Origin to SIS. This came about as the result of the 2011  acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions and Services by Atos Origin.

The original Atos was created in 1997 from the merger of two IT service companies, Axime and Sligos. It then became Atos Origin in 2000, following the merger between Atos and Origin.

But wouldn't that be AOTS?   

And sounds a bit recursive like PHP which stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor"

[Lee]

ATOS is actually AtoS, and stands for Atos Origin to SIS. This came about as the result of the 2011  acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions and Services by Atos Origin.

The original Atos was created in 1997 from the merger of two IT service companies, Axime and Sligos. It then became Atos Origin in 2000, following the merger between Atos and Origin.

But wouldn't that be AOTS?   

And sounds a bit recursive like PHP which stands for "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor"

Might not be logical to you, but that is definitely what it is - I have had to do this particular bit of research before 

You take the At in Atos, the O in Origin (which is "small o" due to its placing in the merged Atos Origin name) and the S in Siemens IT Solutions and Services to form AtoS

[FenMan]

Well, they did say there would be a "a few ripples." None of the new URLs are working, but the old ones are still good.

I stupidly updated my bookmark for Blackwater departures and have managed to grab the old link by visiting here, for which many thanks!

[grahame]

Old links in the pages under the maps have broken



I have removed the old links and added a couple of new displays - dynamic A to Z and arrivals







Other feeds - expecting the underlying stuff will change in the next six weeks ....