What's New – 27th January

Hello, Sunday – it’s time to launch the changes, fixes and improvements!

This week’s highlights:

  • Signalling diagrams now include Kings Cross (in beta). From around 11am on Monday 28th January, the Hatch End – Kings Langley, Kings Langley – Wolverton, Wolverton – Rugby and Acton Wells Junction – Stratford maps will be showing signal aspects and routes set from signals.
  • Freight schedules will be back on the site from Tuesday 29th January, although train reporting numbers (headcodes) won’t be available for reasons of confidentiality. Freight movements will also appear on the signalling maps, with an anonymous placeholder to replace the headcode.
  • RTPPM statistics, as pointed out by a couple of people, were incorrect and were counting late trains twice. This is now fixed.

Looking forwards, updates to the site will be every fortnight for the foreseeable future – a week isn’t quite long enough to get everything done. To whet your appetite, here’s what’s on the cards:

  • Signalling diagrams – I’m hoping to extend the WCML maps up to Coventry and Nuneaton, as well as adding Kings Cross and parts of the ECML, and Waterloo
  • Faster timetable lookups – at the moment, I’m putting a lot of work in to making timetable and schedule lookups faster. It’s a big job, but one that underpins several other things I have planned
  • Real-time train information – discussions are under-way to get predictions and actual arrival/departures on the site.

That’s it for now – the next update to the site will be on Sunday 10th February!

What's New – 13th January

First, an apology. Some of the real-time functionality on the site broke several times this week, and I’ve spent a chunk of development time looking to exactly what happened and how to prevent it happening in the future. I’m reasonably confident I’ve fixed it, but time will tell.

This week, I’ve been working on statistics. The statistics page now has three pie charts:

  • Real-time PPM shows the number of trains across the network which are on-time, late or very late. This data comes straight from Network Rail.
  • Right Time shows the number of trains which arrived at their destination early, or within 59 seconds of their schedule arrival time. This is calculated within OpenTrainTimes.
  • Cancellations shows a breakdown of the reasons for cancellations across the entire network.

The stats are reset at 2am each day, so this evening, the cancellation statistics won’t reflect reality until tomorrow morning.

Admittedly, it’s not much – but given I started a new job this week, you can probably forgive me.

In the coming weeks, I’m hoping to expand the amount of real-time statistics on the site, as well as import historical data so you can look at past performance.

Let me know what you think.

What's New – 6th January

Happy New Year to you all! We’re back with another Sunday night update.

There’s not much to report this week – I have a few features still in development and, rather than releasing them in to the wild right now, I want to wait and see how they perform in staging this week.

This week’s updates are:

  • The slippy map is using Ordnance Survey data, as well as data from OpenStreetMap until I can get railway network data from Network Rail
  • You can now link to specific locations on the map – click ‘Permalink’ and copy and paste the URL from your browser
  • The signalling maps and slippy map load properly on Windows 8/Internet Explorer 10 – although the ‘feedback’ button is still incorrectly positioned. If anyone knows how I can fix this, please get in touch
  • A few hundred missing location names have been entered in to the database, so you shouldn’t see trains to CLPHMJ1 any more
  • Signalling maps now show the number of people viewing the map at the same time as you

Until next week, have fun and keep sending in your feedback!