What's new – Sunday 25th October 2015

Summer’s officially over – the mornings aren’t as light, and the evenings are darker. To make up for this, there are four new or updated maps!

  • The York map has been extended to Thirsk
  • The Darlington map map covers Thirsk, Northallerton, Darlington and Durham, plus the Northallerton to Eaglescliffe and Darlington to Eaglescliffe routes
  • The Newcastle map covers Durham to Newcastle, plus Dunston, Manors and Heworth
  • The Sileby to Langley Mill map has been redrawn, covering Sileby to Sheet Stores Junction, some of the route to Stenson Junction and Derby, plus Toton and Beeston

As always, I’ve been hard at work fixing the smaller bugs that you’ve been reporting – the highlights are:

  • The Crewe map includes ‘train ready to start’ indications for the platforms at Crewe
  • The Exeter map includes has some fixes which caused trains to disappear around Dawlish (no, not in to the sea!)
  • Sometimes, map elements would appear with large yellow sections due to a code problem – that’s been fixed

I have a well-earned holiday coming up shortly, so expect some non-map related features in the next release, probably in a fortnight’s time!

What's new – 11th October 2015

I use f.lux to automatically dim the screen on my phone and laptop when it starts to get dark outside. It’s starting to get dark around 6pm now, which means autumn is here and winter’s not far around the corner.

The good news about darker evenings is there’s more time for me to spend inside adding new features to OpenTrainTimes – which is exactly what I’ve been doing this week! Here’s what’s new:

It wasn’t long ago that the 50th map appeared on the site, and we’re up to 65 now – and still growing.

Finally, I say this every week – please keep your emails coming in with bugs, problems, suggestions and comments. I try to keep on top of my email, but working across a number of projects in the rail industry at the moment, it’s sometimes hard to keep up.

// Peter

What's new – 4th October 2015

One of the problems with working on a number of rail industry projects is that there’s not always sufficient time when I get home to do anything other than have dinner, chill out and bit and go to bed. For this reason, there’s not much to see in this week’s release:

  • A month after the real-time train reporting was rolled out, it stopped for the majority of trains – this is actually a roll-over in the TRUST Train ID, and I’ve spent some time working around this. It’s not perfect yet, but I’m releasing a fix now that caters for nearly all scenarios
  • On the St Pancras to Harpenden map, trains disappeared approaching Kentish Town platform 1 from the north end because a signal was missing. This has now been fixed, and there are also route indications to and from the platforms at the East Midlands Trains platforms
  • The Stafford map now has route indications covering both the north and south end of the station. This is no easy thing to do – there are over 108 of them!

I’m hoping to work more on the site during this week, as there are things I want to get finished off:

  • Some of the routes on the Stafford map aren’t quite right
  • There are route indications to go on the Exeter St. Davids map and the Queenstown Road to Surbiton maps
  • The London Waterloo map is still being redrawn – it’s much clearer and has route indications everywhere
  • …and a couple of other things that I’ll keep as a surprise

Time for a well-earned dinner and glass of wine, I think!