Due to some problems with some of the maps around Liverpool Street, we’re a little late deploying our January updates, but here they are!

• The Peterborough to Doncaster (GN-GE Joint Line) now covers up to Retford Low Level
• Many of the Great Eastern route maps now contain route indications as far as Southend Victoria
• The Crossrail portal west of Stratford International is now included
• The Edinburgh map now joins up with the Fife Circle map at the northern end, and has been extended further south to join up with the map ending at Berwick-upon-Tweed

Finally, if you’re in London on Tuesday 11th February, I’m presenting to the Institution of Railway Signalling Engineers. Tickets are free, but you need to be quick – sign up at Eventbrite.

The end of December is always a busy time on the railways. We’ve been hard at work updating our maps for all the Christmas works, as well as adding some new features. Here’s a summary:

• At London Euston, the HS2 Works Sidings are now shown
• The Bristol Parkway map boasts complete route coverage
• Route indications are now shown on the signals controlled by Morpeth
• The Cardiff Central map now includes the Vale of Glamorgan route with complete route coverage, as well as some route coverage around Cardiff Central
• London Paddington now has route coverage from Ladbroke Grove to London Paddington
• The Bedford to Syston map has the new four-track railway through Sharnbrook, plus route coverage of Sharnbrook Junction
• Motherwell PSB has now been decommissioned, and our map shows the recontrolled area with complete route and signal coverage

This is no easy task – over the past month we’ve added nearly 3,200 new map elements, including signals, routes and berths, all by hand.

There are some additional fixes we’ll be making in the New Year, but now it’s time to shut down the computer and go celebrate the New Year.

Happy New Year!

Another load of updates have gone live on the site. They’re almost all bugfixes or addition of green ‘route set’ lights, but we have some new maps!

• The Carstairs map covers just north of Carlisle to Motherwell, and will have a further update over Christmas when the area is recontrolled and Motherwell PSB closes
• The Glasgow North West map covers Carntyne and Duke Street to Hyndland, via Anniesland and via Yoker to Dalmuir, the Alexandria and Milngavie branches and the terminus at Helensburgh Central
• The Bristol Parkway map has been partially redrawn to show more detail of Stoke Gifford IEP depot, and now has route indications in the Bristol Parkway area
• The Sutton map covers Sutton and extends our coverage of South London further
• The Guildford map has been extended to cover the line through Dorking to Redhill

The problems we’ve been having with our data feeds seem to have resolved themselves. These were a combination of issues on our side compounded by major issues with the Open Data platform, making it difficult to get alerting happening under the right circumstances.

In the coming weeks, we will be looking for testers for our new site. This will have the same look and feel as the current site, but be faster and easier to navigate. Don’t volunteer just yet – we’ve not yet built our public staging infrastructure.

We have been impacted by several different problems with our systems and data feeds over the past couple of months. What is unusual is that on one or two occasions, it was our systems that were at fault, and on some other of the occasions, it was an industry-wide problem.

To play it safe, we’ve held off on making updates to the site until this evening, when we’ve released our latest set of updates. Here are some of the highlights:

• The northern part of Kings Cross PSB’s area of control was migrated to York ROC in August. We’ve updated our Kings Cross and Moorgate to Hitchin, Letchworth to Kings Lynn and Hitchin to Stoke Tunnel maps, and we show all possible signal aspects and route indications
• The Lincoln area map now has route indications at Lincoln Central and other locations where the data is available
• Similarly, the Chester to Llandudno Junction, and Nottingham area maps have route indications where they are available
• Between Shepperton and Fulwell, signal and route indications are now shown correctly
• The new Calder Valley map, covering Rochdale to Bradford Interchange and Brighouse, covers this part of Yorkshire which was resignalled over the past year

We’ve also fixed a couple of problems which crept in after our migration to Amazon EC2 infrastructure, the more serious one causing delays in processing TRUST messages at various times.

And finally, we’re always available for paid consultancy and contract work. Drop an email to hello@opentraintimes.com to discuss your requirements.

Last month, we said that there would be more frequent updates than before. The only downside to this is that making a blog post every time we release an update bombards you with trivial updates. We’ve decided to make posts every couple of weeks, wrapping up the changes since the last post.

Here’s what’s changed over the past few weeks:

• We’ve changed the way we handle cookies, which means there’s a new pop-up when you first visit the site on a device. Some people have reported problems with this – if you’re seeing problems, such as the popup never disappearing, please email us
• Our new East Kent map covers Faversham to Kearsney, Ramsgate, Martin Mill and Minster.
• The Brighton area map has been redrawn, and now covers the Coastway route as far as Lancing, with route indications at Brighton
• The West Coastway map now covers Shoreham-by-Sea to Emsworth – including Littlehampton and Bognor Regis. It links up with the Horsham map at Arundel, and the Guildford map at Emsworth/Warblington.
• The Catford Loop has been added to the West Dulwich to Otford, Teynham and Sheppey map
• The resignalled Shepperton branch now shows routes, signals and track circuit indications
• Train operator codes are now shown on schedule pages so you can easily see who operates a train. The FRGT code shown where we can’t show you the train running number (or headcode) has now been replaced with a simple padlock symbol – you can still click on it to show the schedule though
• We’ve made some efficiency savings to the site so pages load faster and feel more responsive

We will continue making updates live as soon as they’ve gone through testing, and we’re making a real effort to try to get through the backlog of support tickets – please bear with us!

Now that we have a vastly improved server infrastructure, we’re able to do releases on a much more frequent basis. This week, there’s been a minor release every couple of days, and we’ve done the following:

• At Ferryhill South Junction, the berth for signal T474 populates when Y474 at Northallerton is occupied. We think this is a cosmetic error within the signalling system itself, with no impact on safety. We’ve put a note on the map to mention this
• Between Horsforth and Headingley, berth 3888 never showed trains. We’ve fixed this
• The Rugby map now has route indications for about a third of the map, and we’ve fixed an error with the positioning of some signals in the yard
• Many of the route indications at Sittingbourne showed incorrectly. This was down to a problem with data mapping on our side – we were one bit out! We’ve fixed this, and in the coming hours, the incorrect routes should clear out. We’ve also added route and signal indications to the Sheppey branch
• Signals TL2047 and TL2049 near North Kent East Junction to the right of the London Bridge map now show their aspect
• We’ve removed the berth for signal 1001 at Meadowhall (Sheffield), as this is a distant signal
• At Clapham Junction, we’ve added some more route indications on platforms 1 to 11
• Trains through the tunnel near High Brooms disappeared, so we’ve added an extra berth so don’t disappear
• Platform 1 at Willesden Junction can have a train terminate and run back north to Harlesden. We’ve added the missing berth, which is useful when London Overground terminate trains there
• At Nunhead, we had signal 452 listed twice, and we’ve corrected this
• Trains to and from Selby at Temple Hirst Junction between Doncaster and York now show in all berths on the line, and route indications for trains to and from the branch will now appear
• Signal G426 at Cheltenham Spa is now shown as a ground position light (GPL), not a main aspect
• Missing signal B66 near Nailsea & Yatton is now on the map, so trains will no longer disappear there
• Some errors crept in around the junction to Yate – two signals were missed, and some route indications were incorrectly drawn
• We now have route indications around Newport

We’ve also started planning for the migration to our new back-end server infrastructure, which will start with our train describer processor. Once this is live, the hit-and-miss linking between trains on the map and schedule data will be much, much more robust. More on that in later weeks.

We are back to a sorry state of affairs, similar to the problems we had back in December 2018, where the train describer feed from the Network Rail Data Feeds platform starts sending message through later and later, then finally drops lots of messages.

This isn’t a problem affecting just us – sites such as RailCam and Traksy are also affected. There are alternative feeds that we can use which don’t have this problem of late and missing messages, but using them at the moment wouldn’t be in the interests of the whole Open Data community. For this reason, we’ve decided to let the quality of information on our site degrade so we can get the right level of focus on the problem.

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!

Our new site infrastructure is progressing really well. The mapping engine is under test at the moment, and we have a big configuration exercise about to start to get it all working. More on that in a few weeks.

Despite all the testing, we’ve released a map of the Horsham area, and fixed a couple of issues on the Derby map.

Earlier this week, we launched our updated Derby map and promised that we’d be adding route indications in due course. Today, we released the update, along with several other issues fixed:

• A crossover from Royal Oak Sidings at Paddington was commissioned at Christmas and is now present on the map
• We’ve included two berths at Glenrothes with Thornton which will more accurately show trains in the station
• There’s a new pair of berths between Shiplake and Henley which will stop trains disappearing on the branch
• Signal 2490 at Oxford now shows descriptions when trains pass through
• Two berths near Proof House Junction outside Birmingham New Street were showing incorrect descriptions

We’re still working hard on our new Scottish map – more on that in a subsequent update.