I am very pleased to announce that Rockshore, have stepped forward and agreed to sponsor OpenTrainTimes in the mid-term. As a result, I’m delighted to say that OpenTrainTimes is now back!

I have had a steady stream of wholly supportive and positive emails over the last month from people who have used the site. Thank you to everyone who took the time to get in touch – there are more of you than I thought!

So, the site is back and running on new code which I’d been working on for some months before the site was shut down. There are a few important changes, however:

• The beta server is gone – it was too labour-intensive to run two versions of the site. Instead, many of the features and improvements from the beta site are now on the main site
• The layout is different – this is OpenTrainTimes version 3, considerably changed under the bonnet from previous versions, based on everything I’ve learned over the last three years
• Some features are missing – simply down to the fact this is my hobby. I will be bringing the PPM statistics back soon, don’t worry
• There are more maps – see below for a list, and there will be more coming
• There are bugs – this code is fairly new, so please report bugs to feedback@opentraintimes.com. I already know about the dodgy handling of trains over midnight

Many people absolutely loved the maps, and I’m pleased to say that the following brand-new maps are now included on the site:

• Brighton Main Line from London Victoria to Streatham Junction, East Croydon to Gatwick Airport, Gatwick Airport to Hassocks and Hassocks to Brighton
• High Speed 1 from St Pancras International to Stratford
• South Eastern Main Line from Grove Park to Hildenborough and Hildenborough to Tonbridge
• Parts of the South Coast lines – East Coastway and West Coastway
• …and finally, the Suburban Lines around Dartford

The previous maps (West Coast, East Coast, Thameslink/Midland Mainline) maps will be ported over in due course.

Once the new site is stable and bedded in, I’ll be working on more maps and functionality.

Covering costs

I’ve never wanted to run the site at a profit – but I need to cover costs. Some of the things I’m considering to keep the site up and running in the long term are:

• A one-off donation
• A regular donation
• Subscriptions, which will give access to additional features on the site

Any excess money will be set aside to keep the site running for longer, and I’ll continue to donate my spare time and energy for the benefit of everyone.

It’s been a couple of months since the last blog post and quite a long time since the site’s been updated. Several people have emailed me to ask what’s going on, and this blog post will explan everything.

This year has not been an easy year for me on a personal level. I’ve had several massive changes, including starting a new career in January and the sudden death of my father in June. On top of this, I’ve been extremely busy with my day-job and the last thing I want to do some days is come home and spend another three hours writing code! I pump a great deal of energy and passion in to my job, which is paying off, but I don’t want to burn out.

I made the unconscious decision to work on some other things for a while, setting aside working on the beta site and working on other things. About a month ago, I returned to working on the site, reviewing the code I’ve written over the past three years, and came to the conclusion that I need to make the site better by replacing it, rather than continually painting and extending it. I’m doing that job right now – which takes time, but I am in no rush.

There are also several other problems I’m tackling – one of which being exactly how far you can go with the Network Rail Data Feeds. The fact of the matter is that it’s impossible to predict much of the future from these data feeds, because there’s a lot of other data which isn’t public. Unfortunately, that situation is very unlikely to change – I’ve been trying quite vocally for the past few years, and I know far too much about all the issues at play.

In summary, I’m still very much behind the site and Open Data in general. I want OpenTrainTimes to continue to be free and useful, but to go to the next level, I need to take some time to rebuild the foundations.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m pleased to say that OpenTrainTimes 2.2 is now in public beta. I’d intended to launch this a couple of months ago, but various things – including ill health and on my part and shortly afterwards, the unexpected death of my father – delayed things somewhat.

Before I get in to what’s new and changed, I’d like to point out that I run OpenTrainTimes out of my own pocket and I’ve never accepted any donations nor put advertising on the site. If you like the site and you want to give some money, please send whatever you think is appropriate to Marie Curie Cancer Care – through the OpenTrainTimes Development page on JustGiving. You can also text “OPEN67” with either £1, £2, £3, £4, £5 or £10 to 70070 to donate.

Boring bit over, here’s the exciting stuff 🙂

The new version is in public beta because I’ve not been able to test it as thoroughly as previous versions, and there still may be bugs. Please go check it out at http://beta.opentraintimes.com/ and report bugs to feedback@opentraintimes.com.

There are several extra maps:

• London Kings Cross – Welwyn Garden City, including the Hitchin Flyover and Moorgate Branch. The Hertford Loop data isn’t yet available due to a data fault – I’m anticipating having this online in the next couple of weeks
• London Charing Cross/Cannon Street to just north of Spa Road Junction. This includes the high and low level platforms at London Bridge
• Sharnbrook Junction – Loughborough, including the curve at Wigston and line to Hinckley
• London Marylebone – Neasden South Junction
• London Fenchurch Street – Upton Park

…and some of the old maps have been upgraded:

• East London Line – Highbury and Islington to New Cross Gate now has signal numbers, aspects and route indications, as well as a number of corrections around New Cross Gate
• North London Line – Acton Wells Junction – Stratford has signal numbers, track circuits and numerous corrections around Stratford
• Hatch End to Kings Langley has signal numbers, corrected routes and the fringe with the DC lines platforms

…and two notable new features:

• There’s more control over searching for schedules. You can hide passenger trains, empty passenger trains and non-passenger trains, as well as filter by schedule type and whether the train passes
• The schedule route map is back – click “Functions” and “Show route map” on a schedule page

So, please go and test the new site and feed back any problems. If all goes well, I’ll make this live in a couple of weeks, or whenever the majority of bugs are squashed.

It’s been a month since I last updated you all on the plans for the future… so where are we?

First, good news – I have real-time train movements working in the development environment. This has taken several weeks of solid effort, writing test plans, writing code, fixing code and committing it. There’s reporting for the vast majority of trains, and cancellations, reinstatements and short-tripped trains are all handled well.

The bad news is that, when testing the system in an environment similar to production, it runs too slowly. There’s around a 4-5 minute lag through most of the day, which is unacceptable and I can’t release code in this state. There are two options – either upgrade the production server (which is expensive), or rewrite the code to be more efficient. I’ve opted for the latter.

Rest assured that real-time movements are still very much on the cards, along with a bunch of other features that I’ll write about next week.

Thank you to the vast number of you who have taken the “How Do You Use OpenTrainTimes?” Survey. It’s open for the next three weeks, so if you haven’t responded yet, please do so. The results are interesting, useful and in some cases, quite surprising – and they’re shaping plans for the future.

One of the most requested features is real-time train movement data. I’ve been working in the background for the past couple of months on getting this up and running, and I’ve made excellent progress in the past two weeks. Assuming I continue at this pace, I’m estimating releasing OpenTrainTimes 2.2 with real-time train movements in three weeks.

Something else I’ve been working on is producing timetable data for Great Britain in GTFS format. After chatting to a few people at the FutureEverything Innovation Challenge this weekend, I realised that there are 587 transit agencies providing GTFS data, and seemingly nobody in Great Britain.

What do I normally do when there’s a gaping hole in a domain that I understand and care about? I fix it, and I’ve created data.opentraintimes.com which will have a daily-updated GTFS-format snapshot of GB timetable data. There are just two more bugs to fix relating to trains which run overnight, but I’m anticipating fixing these early this week.

On to this week’s updates – as I’ve been so busy doing other things, there are only a few minor bugs which I’ve fixed:

• The London Waterloo – Earlsfield/Chiswick/North Sheen map had platform numbers at Barnes and Putney labelled incorrectly. Note that due to caching, you might still see the old map for a couple of hours)
• When using Internet Explorer 9, the Feedback link was rotated incorrectly
• Trains at Stratford Parkway (STY) weren’t showing
• Times on the homepage were an hour behind reality

Expect a period of relative quiet over the next couple of weeks whilst I get real-time data up and running – but please, as always, keep your feedback coming!

// Peter