Sorry if you’ve been unable to access the site over the last 48 hours – there was a problem with one of the DNS servers that handles opentraintimes.com which was directing people at an old server for the site. It’s fixed now.

In case you want the details – the primary nameserver for opentraintimes.com has been upgraded and reinstalled, but the BIND configuration I put back was a copy from several months ago before I migrated from Amazon to Rackspace. The serial number on the zone was lower than that on the secondary servers for the domain, so none of the secondaries picked it up. It’s a case of luck as to which server you get sent to, so there was roughly a 1-in-5 chance of picking up the server with rogue information.

Backups are good, but restoring the right one is even better!

What a lot has happened in the last three months since the last post.

Network Rail, working with Rockshore, have opened up some of their information systems. This is the same data that I started working with a year ago – except it’s now open to everyone. I met with Network Rail shortly before the platform was released (along with a group of other developers) and made suggestions for several, more detailed sets of information to be opened up, and I have more on my list for the next meeting in September.

To help the developer community, I’ve started the Open Rail Data Wiki, and it’s a busy little thing already. OpenTrainTimes is getting a design overhaul and these real-time feeds integrated, which is a massive job to do properly – but ‘properly’ is what I want to do.

Finally, two other items of great interest are that Network Rail have also released the Working Timetable and Sectional Appendices, both available on their transparency page. I’m still hiding freight trains from OpenTrainTimes, and still pestering Network Rail to make a decision on whether or not these are shown.

Part of the reason I’ve not been fixing bugs as quickly as I can is because I’ve been working incredibly hard on a new design for the site.

If you follow @opentraintimes on Twitter, you will have noticed a rather stylish red set of tracks. They’re part of a new logo for the site, which – if you’re looking at the blog site itself – is at the top of the page.

I’m hoping to launch the new design in the next couple of weeks. It’s not as simple as slapping a logo on and saying “Job done!” – if it were that easy, I’d have done it a month ago when the designer came back to me with the logo.

It’s been a couple of months now, and we’re not any closer to having a formal policy on showing freight times on the site.

Network Rail is a huge organisation, and those sized companies tend to operate at glacial speeds for many things strategic and non-operational. Given that I don’t believe anyone else has said “What’s the policy with showing freight timings on a public website?” to them before, they unsurprisingly don’t have the answers yet.

Having thought long and hard about the situation, putting freight data back on the site may provoke a negative response from everyone involved in the discussions at Network Rail and FOCs. The outcome of that will likely be a “No”, and we all lose out – all for the sake of some ‘gen’.

I’ve decided to try a different tactic to get this issue resolved and the situation made clear. I’m in the process of contacting the FOCs concerned to ask what their policy is, and agreeing which schedules they’re happy to have on public display, and which ones they’d rather not be on display. The benefits of this are clear – neutral, fair access to freight schedules for everyone, not just “gen masters”.

I’m pleased to say that Tom Cairns (of traintimes.im) has joined me in keeping freight off his site until we can find out what the official state of play is.

Thank you to everyone who has emailed in with words of support, particularly those people who have offered to help. There are lots of people who are upset, maybe even angry about where we are now. Remember that we are in a new era of transparency and accountability, and that the rules of engagement are still being formed.

I’m sorry for the poor performance of the website today – from about 7am to mid-afternoon, the site was really slow to load.

The problem has been fixed now. The root cause was really slow disk throughput on the database server. The hosting provider knows why and has taken steps to stop it happening again in future.

I’ve been wrestling with map data this evening – it’s incredibly exciting to be able to grab data from completely different sources and plot it on a map.

Here’s what I’m up to at the moment – 1F69 is the 1930 service from London St Pancras to Derby, shown here just outside Leicester:

It’s going to be a few more weeks before I release this on to the site, but I wanted to give you all a taster of some of the things I’m planning. I might even colour the ‘blob’ in a different colour according to whether the train’s on time or not…

One of the things I’ve been working quite hard on over the past week is representing the position of a train on a map, and I’ve finally had success.

I have several ideas up my sleeve, but I’ve started with the simplest – replicating the signalling system and overlaying train identities on parts of the track. And here’s the result – click the image for a larger version:

This is still very much in-development, inefficient and not scalable – all the best ideas start off like that!

And in answer to the question on everybody’s lips – “when?” – well, just as soon as Network Rail finish off their Open Data platform and I can move this in to Open Train Times properly!

As always, do email me – peter.hicks@poggs.co.uk – with all your comments. They brighten up an otherwise unexciting journey on an 450HC 🙂

Finally, after a lot of hard work and head-scratching, Empty Coaching Stock schedules are back! To see them on the site, click “Options” in the top-right hand corner of any page, and select “Detailed”.

I’ve made some other improvements, the biggest being optimising database queries so pages load quicker. It’s still a little slow for stations such as London Bridge and East Croydon, and I’m working on speeding that up.

Enjoy, and please keep sending in bug reports and strange things you see happening.

I’ve been very quiet here lately, for which I apologise. I’m actually doing some behind-the-scenes engineering to make the site faster, as it’s undoubtedly going to be very popular when Network Rail are up and running with their promised Open Data platform in a couple of months.

Continuing thanks to everyone who has been in touch about the site – pointing out bugs, suggesting things or asking about freight and charter times. I need very few fingers indeed to count the number of negative emails I’ve had, and I think there’s only been two people I’ve been unable to win over by being honest and open about things.

So, what’s happening with the timetable data? I’ve been talking with Network Rail about the timetable situation, and they’re having some internal discussions – I’m hoping (but I can’t promise) to know what the situation will be in the next fortnight. Please continue to hang in there.

Finally – a couple of people have reported that passing times for trains are no longer shown. I’m pleased to report that I’ve found the reason why and fixed the bug – if you’re in Detailed Mode (previously Advanced mode), you’ll see PASS times for trains which are timed, but do not stop, at a location.

Please keep sending in your feedback – as ever, it’s really important that I know what you think so I can shape what happens with the site.

It’s been six weeks since I launched OpenTrainTimes. In that short space of time, I’ve had over 17,000 unique visitors to the site and over 20,000 page views every day. That’s an awful lot of people, an awful lot of data, and far exceeded my expectations!

I’ve been swamped with emails from people singing the praises of the site – so much so that I haven’t been able to reply to every email personally. If I’ve missed yours off, I do apologise – there are only so many hours in the day.

Many people have pointed out bugs in the site, many more have made suggestions on what they’d like to see next. I thought I’d give you all a sneak preview of what I’m working on next.

• ECS and Freight – judging by all the emails I’ve had over the past week, everyone wants to see freight and empty coaching stock (ECS) schedules back on the site. From later today, I’m going to put ECS trains back. I’m working on getting formal clarification on showing other schedules, but I really have no idea when this will be, as I’m not aware that anyone else has gone down this path before. I had a really positive meeting with Network Rail on Thursday, and this was one of the subjects I brought up. Watch this space…
• Real-time data. I already have a TRUST feed with data for four TOCs, and I hope to have a full feed with all TOCs from about Easter-time. The biggest hurdle here is scaling it up – with about 30 concurrent visitors to the site at peak times, I don’t want everything to grind to a halt when I get another 100 looking at live train times!
• Real-time maps. I have a feed from the train describer (TD) system, and I’m looking to make a real-time map of train positions, similar to swisstrains.ch. Harry Wood has been really helpful in talking through the geographical side of things, and I’ve had some success at rendering a map of the UK with cities and rail lines. The tricky part will be keeping the trains running along the lines on the map. The majority of trains in the UK don’t have GPS and don’t feed their position back, so there will be a lot of behind-the-scenes decoding going on.

So, that’s it. I now have the quite straightforward task of getting more rail industry data opened up (with many other people working toward the same goal), running a very popular and free website, and integrating three new, and quite big features. All that alongside spending 8 hours a day working and 3 hours a day travelling.