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FEATURE
Open TRAIN
CLIVE KESSELL
TIMES
P
roducing a robust timetable and equipping it with systems that can minimise the effects of any disruption (see accompanying article) is one thing, but conveying all this real time information to the general public is something else.
When disruption occurs, it is a common complaint that ‘nobody knows what’s going on’ or ‘staff on the station don’t tell us anything’. This can be fair criticism and many readers will have experienced just these situations. Even when things are going well, information such as up-todate details of train times, platforms, train formation and suchlike can be a bit minimal at other than the busiest of stations. Yet all the information is there, even if the associated decision making is not always as sharp as people would like. Can this information be conveyed to the public in a form that is understandable? A trial some years ago at Peterborough involved the provision of a display screen in the concourse showing the train describer movements as being shown to the signaller in Peterborough Power Box. Cynics said that people would not understand what the diagram was conveying nor the head codes or the stepping functions. They were wrong and regular rail users soon learned to interpret the train movements and how these would relate to their intended journey. Maybe the travelling public are not as stupid as some people think! Could the idea be extended further to make train movement data available as a national provision service that would be accessible from any smart phone or tablet device?
Rail Engineer | Issue 183 | April 2020
One man who thought so is Peter Hicks, who is the driving force behind Open Train Times (OTT). Peter is a former IP Network engineer and now a Railway Systems consultant and software developer. He is also a rail commuter, so has first-hand experience of knowing what is needed.
Accessing the data Since Network Rail compiles the timetable and owns all the signalling systems that deliver train movement information, getting its cooperation was clearly vital. The first step, however, was knowing what to ask for. Train schedules are created in TPS (Train Planning System) for the current and next timetable period. This is exported in the rail-specific CIF format, the origins of
which date back to a mainframe system called TSDB (Train Service Data Base) developed by British Rail. A full timetable is around 600Mbytes of data and contains the timetable for 12 months. Shortterm changes and variations to existing schedules are loaded incrementally with updates published each night. Nonetheless, Network Rail was asked if this CIF data could be made available with real-time data feeds for an open data project. The immediate answer was “nobody has ever asked for this before”, but a policy decision was eventually made to allow access. So far so good. However, the next question was “can real time data be obtained and can we use this data for distribution purposes so that everyone can take advantage?” This was more difficult and it ended up being discussed at the Department for Transport’s Transparency Board. Eventually, the government decided that it was in the public interest and the data should be made available for general
