What's new – 27th August 2016

This weekend, London Cannon Street to London Bridge is recontrolled to a new workstation at Three Bridges ROC. We’ve spent quite some time updating the London Bridge area map ready for these changes, including even more route indications toward the Low Level platforms, and track and route indications around Cannon Street.

We’ve just made this revised map live earlier than planned so you can see the signalling being commissioned, and also because we have a massive number of fixes and enhancements for you this week! Here’s the list:

  • The Hillington West to Gourock and Wemyss Bay map has dozens of new route indications to show where trains have been routed
  • The Cricklewood and Hendon to Acton Wells map now has limited signal and route indications. Some of the signals are semaphore signals rather than colour light signals – we’d planned on animating the semaphores so they showed ‘on’ and ‘off’ correctly, but since there are so few semaphore signals that we have status data for, we decided to spend our time elsewhere
  • Two missing berths on the up lines on the Nuneaton to Rugeley Trent Valley map have been added, so trains will no longer disappear when crossing between signalling centres
  • There are lots of fixes to the Grove Park to Bromley North and Hildenborough map: we’ve fixed the layout at the Marshalling Yard North at Tonbridge, added the MPV depot, AD2063 shunt signal, moved AD117 signal to its correct position, fixed the berth which always shows XXXX at Sevenoaks, removed the ‘Last sent’ berths as they never showed anything, added a route from AD66 in to platform 2 and L322 to Grove Park,
  • Some signals on various maps were stuck on green. We can’t see why this is, so we’ve set them back to danger and we’ll monitor the situation. It’s likely that we’ve suffered from an outage to our feeds from Network Rail at some point and are missing data
  • On maps with data from the IECCs at Ashford, any berth shared between two signals (a dual berth) never displayed any indication. We’ve put separate berths in and fixed this small problem on several of the maps
  • At Selhurst on the London Victoria to East Croydon map, T76 signal was shown in the wrong direction
  • We extended the Ingatestone to Hatfield Peverel map to cover up to the fringe with Colchester PSB, including the Braintree and Sudbury branches from Witham and Marks Tey respectively
  • The Didcot Parkway to Banbury map had a few issues with position light signals, which we’ve fixed

What's new – 14th August 2016

It’s been an incredibly busy fortnight. Our new ticketing system for support@opentraintimes.com is proving popular and really helping us keep track of the stack of emails coming in asking for help. It will also let you log in to see the latest updates on any bugs you raise!

We’ve nearly finished the revised London Bridge map, ready for the resignalling work over the August Bank Holiday, and we’re hard at work on some other projects for the rail industry. Over the next couple of months, we’ll start to make our consultancy and technical services available. More about that in another update – you’re anticipating the changes and fixed this week, aren’t you? Here they are!

  • Rail Operations Group trains will now appear in the schedule pages with their real headcodes! In the coming weeks, we’ll be changing the maps so that their services also appear on the maps with their real headcodes
  • We have a brand new map of the Berks & Hants line from Southcote Junction to Heywood Junction (exc.), covering the route through Newbury and Bedwyn down to just before Westbury – which will be coming in a later map
  • On the schedule location pages, the schedule type (WTT, VAR, STP and CAN) buttons didn’t work. This appears to have been due to a code upgrade in the past and wasn’t caught by our testing – but we’ve fixed it so you can filter out the types of schedules you don’t want
  • On the Liverpool Street to Romford map, we’ve added Aldersbrook Sidings near Ilford, changed the map to reflect the plain line past the loop at Romford and removed Mile End Yard, Chadwell Heath and Goodmayes Up sidings
  • The icon for a TOPS 2000-reported departure wasn’t showing the same as the key, so we’ve updated the key to show the correct icon
  • On the Esher to Basingstoke map, some signals near Winchfield were missing, which caused trains to disappear. These are now back on the map
  • The Chilterns map was missing some signals between Aylesbury and Little Kimble, and between Haddenham and Thame Parkway and Princes Risborough, which we’ve added in
  • Trains weren’t showing up in platform 15 on the Edinburgh map, so we’ve fixed this so that trains actually do show up
  • On the revamped Oxford map, signal ME364 was missing, which we’ve added in
  • Two signals were positioned on the wrong lines on the Leyland to Lancaster map, which we’ve corrected

Until next time, enjoy the site!