Storm Doris and the latest running trains

Thursday 23rd February was the busiest day ever on the site – we had over twice the number of visitors to the site and at one point, had well over a thousand users viewing our live maps. Our continual monitoring and service improvement meant we only had a single alert from our monitoring system – and that was a warning rather than an error.

Looking back over what happened that day, we’ve dug out the trains which arrived at their destination the latest. Virgin Trains’ 0840 Glasgow Central to London Euston arrived 351 minutes late at 1901 vice 1310, and on the freight side of things, the 2022 Cardiff Tidal to Mossend arrived 488 minutes late.

What’s new – 26th February 2017

We’ve been busy over the last few weeks bringing you two new maps, one updated map and a brand new feature. All of these have been requested by a number of people over the last few months and whilst we can’t always drop all our plans to implement something new, we can shape what happens long-term.

For the impatient, here are the most important bits of news:

  • Each map now has three checkboxes at the bottom – "Signal Numbers" will toggle signal numbers off and on, "Signals" will do the same for signals, and "Berths" will only show berths with descriptions
  • The Retford to Colton Junction map extends our coverage of the East Coast Main Line up to Doncaster
  • Going further north, the Bentley to Holbeck Junction map covers the route through Wakefield Westgate up to just south of Leeds
  • We’ve also updated the Leeds are map, tidied up some of the lines and added route indications to the south side of the station
  • The Hinton Admiral to Weymouth map now has indications displayed in the Dorchester West signalbox area

For anyone who’s still here and hasn’t rushed off to look at the Doncaster map, there are a bunch of smaller things, including updating the Great Eastern Main Line maps for the imminent move of Shenfield IECC to the ROC at Romford, fixes for signals, berths and routes not showing correctly, and updates in the Queenstown Road area outside London Waterloo, an extension of the Westbury map to include Bradford Junction.

Phew. Time for a cup of tea…!

What’s new – 5th February 2017

It’s been three weeks since the last release, and we’ve been hard at work bringing you numerous bug-fixes and improvements, as well as three very important map updates:

  • The Manningtree to Norwich map extends our coverage of the Great Eastern Main Line up through Ipswich to Norwich. Whilst we have signal aspects for most of the map, route indications aren’t supplied as default by the train describer, and we’re working on calculating them
  • The Airedale Valley map covers the suburban lines from outside Leeds to Shipley, Ilkley, Bradford Forster Square and Skipton – with full route coverage
  • The West Ealing to Airport Junction and Heathrow now has full route coverage!

Some of the smaller, but still important changes include:

  • Coverage of Allington Junction getting signal and route indications (although the data from the train describer isn’t complete)
  • The misconfigured and mispositioned berths at Macclesfield, Heaton Chapel and Levenshulme are fixed
  • The bay platforms at Reading and Newbury, which previously didn’t show trains terminating in the platform, will now show the last train to enter the platform
  • To everyone who took the time to get in touch over the past few weeks – a massive thank you. We log every email we receive to the support email address and try our hardest to get issues fixed as quickly as we can. Sometimes this takes a while, so if you’ve been waiting patiently, sorry!

    And now we’re done for another few weeks. The next map will be a secret, but is one that’s going to be really popular!