Hatch End to Kings Langley

This week has been all about maps. There are only two major updates this week:

First off is the Hatch End to Kings Langley map. Why such a small area? Simple – it’s the only part of the West Coast Main Line that’s directly under Watford Junction PSB’s control.

Next, and finally, the London Euston to Hatch End map has had substantial work and now includes the relief lines used by Southern services, and a handful of other locations in the Willesden and Wembley area. It’s a map which doesn’t fit neatly on to one page, but I’m working on ways to compress it without losing detail.

Behind the scenes, I’m been working on processing Temporary Speed Restriction (TSR) data, published weekly on Friday mornings – and beavering away at producing a richer and more colourful map of Action Wells to Stratford, with signal aspects and routes.

That’s it for another week – I’m hoping to get the TSR pages ready for next Sunday’s release, and I’m still working on ways to make the site faster as it continues to be popular. Do keep your feedback coming in, as well as suggestions for new features.

Remembrance Day release

I missed the deadline for last week’s release – there were some problems that cropped up which took a few days to fix. This means there are two weeks of fixes and new features to announce!

There are two exciting things to announce this week:

  • The East London Line map is now complete up to New Cross, New Cross Gate and Silwood Junction. There is little information about this in the Sectional Appendix, so I spent a few hours yesterday surveying the line by hand
  • I’ve done a lot of work to restructure the timetable database, which respond more consistently. I have another set of performance improvements to put in, which I’m testing at the moment

There is more work to do on the London Euston – Hatch End map, particularly with the Relief lines, and I’ve also started on a Hatch End – Kings Langley map.

As always, most of the bugs that have been reported are now fixed:

  • Switching between tabs on the schedule page is now fixed – you can click on the Facilities and Technical links again
  • Pointwork at Euston and a missing crossover at Mitre Bridge Junction have been corrected – there were some missing crossovers. Thanks to Roger for noticing
  • Some TD areas were shown as dead on the TD Status page. It turns out that not all train describers send heartbeats, so I’ve worked around this. There are still some areas which show a cross – these are train describers which haven’t yet been commissioned

Once again, thanks to everyone for your feedback. Having a full-time job and a busy social life means I can’t always fix all bugs every week, but I do record them all in a bug tracking database so they’re not forgotten.