Our Christmas release is now live – the highlight being a beta map of St Pancras to Bedford in preparation for the re-control of West Hampstead PSB’s area of control to new WestCAD workstations. The new map has signal aspects only at the moment – over the coming days, we’ll be adding route indications – but we need to validate the data we’re receiving first.

This re-control brings signal aspects and route indications for the entire area between St Pancras International and Kentish Town to north of Bedford. Previously, the train describer at West Hampstead was only able to output a handful of signal and route indications.

The immense number of changes in the map means that we need to go through a period of testing. Luckily, the new train describer is outputting similar berth-level data to the system that is replaces, and the existing two maps of the Thameslink North route will continue to work, with the exception of St Pancras International.

We’ve also made a number of other minor fixes, including:

• Further route indications south of Peterborough on the East Coast Main Line
• Removing ‘auto’ signal indications around York, which are no longer sent by the train describer and cause the signals to remain at danger on our site
• An update to Holbeck Sidings near Leeds to reflect work carried out there recently
• Tidying up berth alignments on the Coventry – Birmingham map
• A small fix to the chord at Doncaster toward Conisborough

After we’ve finalised the Thameslink North map, we’ll be moving our sights to Ashford International, where the map has been redrawn to correct a number of small errors, enabling us to put in route indications for the entire map, and cover the route through to Maidstone East.

As with last week, we’ve been hard at work getting through the backlog of fixes to maps on the site, as well as releasing a new map

We’re proud to present a new map of Cardiff Queen Street to Coryton, Rhymney and Cardiff Bay, which is controlled by Network Rail at the Wales ROC in Cardiff.

In terms of fixes:

• The Swansea map is updated and reflects the re-control of the Port Talbot West area to a new WestCAD system at Port Talbot PSB
• We’ve redrawn part of the Horsham map and fixed the long-standing bug with signal and route indications, adding Train Ready to Start indications for the platforms
• The Stalybridge to Penistone, Healy Mills and Leeds map reflects the resignalling in the Dewsbury area and the changes at Stalybridge
• At Gatwick Airport, we’ve updated the track layout on platforms 6 and 7
• Reston station now appears on the Edinburgh to Berwick map

Coming up at Christmas, we’ll have a refreshed and redrawn map of the West Hampstead PSB control area, reflecting the re-control to a number of new WestCAD workstations. This will have comprehensive signal aspect and route set indications.

A couple of hours ago, we released our latest map of the Core Valley Lines, covering the branches to Treherbert, Aberdare and Merthyr Tydfil, with services operated by Transport for Wales. The route to Treherbert is currently closed and will be opening in early 2024, but the rest of the routes show signal aspects, route indications and importantly, train movements.

These routes are signalled and maintained by TfW from the Core Valley Lines Integrated Control Centre, the CVLICC, at Taffs Well. The operation is similar to other parts of non-Network Rail infrastructure such as the East London Line, where train movement and signalling status indications are sent to Network Rail’s systems.

We are starting work on adding the routes to Rhymney and Coryton, including Cardiff Queen Street in to a separate map.

It’s been a busy year – we’ve had so much paid work to do that there’s not been enough time to update our maps with infrastructure changes.

A number of people have been in touch with us to complain about some maps being out-of-date, with a few getting irritated that we can’t just drop our day-to-day jobs and concentrate on the public website.

Please bear in mind that the public website is a free resource which we try to keep updated, but since we make absolutely zero money from the site and operate it at-cost, it has to be prioritised lower than the work we do for the rail industry. We don’t run ads on our site, because nobody likes them (and many block them), we don’t charge a subscription fee, and we don’t track or sell your data like Facebook or Twitter.

On a more positive note, this weekend, we concentrated our efforts on updating the Windsor Lines and Staines maps to show the transfer of control of Feltham ASC to Basingstoke ROC. This happened a couple of months ago, and our maps are now up-to-date.

We’ve also updated the North London Line map to reflect the changes to the control system at Upminster IECC this weekend.

We are busy preparing for the West Hampstead re-control at Christmas, and about to start work on updating the Carstairs map. But please be kind whilst we catch up with updating other maps. We are doing our best, but we need to keep the lights on!