The last few months have been hectic. We’re continuing to work on the next major release of the site, which is a total rewrite – and to make sure the public-facing site remains free, we’ve been taking on more consultancy and software development work for the rail industry. Some of the projects that have had our input are very interesting, but not in the public domain – but the important thing is they’ll make sure there is always a public, free version of the site.

Many of you will have noticed that the Network Rail Data Feeds platform has been substantially less reliable than we need it to be over the past weeks and months. Outages started happening several times a day, meaning we weren’t able to bring you accurate information. This didn’t just affect us – all other sites using the Open Data platform were affected. The sheer scale of the problem and the number of people affected has been brought to Network Rail’s attention, and their supplier and maintainer of the Data Feeds platform is working on making it more stable.

Separately, we’ve invested a great deal of time and a lot of money in getting resilient connectivity set up to Network Rail for our commercial projects. We are seriously considering moving the public-facing website over to this feed – but there’s work to do so we obfuscate (hide) freight and engineering trains in the same way as the Open Data feed does. This will mean we’ll be immune to any future outages that affect the Open Data platform, which is obviously good – but is this the right thing for us to do? Having such a large and visible site to highlight problems with the data feeds is useful – it means there’s one more big name that’s affected when problems occur, and that helps get the problems fixed for everyone, not just us. Maybe we should continue with the public site using public feeds. Comment on this post with your thoughts.

We’ve set up a status site to show you what’s going on. Any outages will be reported here once our systems detect them, and also tweeted to a new account (details to come). You can subscribe via email to alerts too.

This status page plugs directly in to our monitoring systems, which we’ve moved over to Amazon EC2 so we can run the public site alongside our commercial products. Over Christmas, we’re going to be moving the last bits of the website over. You shouldn’t see anything different.

Finally, we made a few updates to the existing site:

• The Filton 4-Tracking project has completed, and our Bristol Parkway map has been updated. We’ve had to move the Avonmouth route on to a new map, because there’s simply no way we could manage to fit it on to the existing map!
• The line between Saltmarshe, Howden and Ferriby has been recontrolled to York ROC, and is now available on our Hull area map
• The Thameslink route through Wimbledon was moved to new signalling system at Three Bridges ROC some months ago and, a little late, we’ve updated our map to include route and signal indications

Until the next time, have a peaceful festive period, and see you in 2019!