Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

map.signalbox.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 165 posts

Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

#41

Post by steamsloth »

Perhaps I’m going mad based off the praise heaped in other responses, but - something seems wildly off with the locations?

I just witnessed a London Liverpool street service plough through the M25 motorway - about 40 miles south of it's typical route and 5 miles south of the nearest actual railway. Dozens of the trains seem to be traversing through the English channel/La Manche towards the north sea.

In fact the number of trains actually tracking a rail line (and this is outside of the cities where the tube/metro might obscure this) seems in the minority. Most seem to be going straight through the middle of farmers fields on some obscure course unrelated to theirs.

Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

#42

Post by redeyedtreefrog »

Would be better if it had some technical explanation rather than just yet another public transport map. This:

https://vgcgroup.co.uk/news/signalbox-for-train-locations/

suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way. I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are, or what the AI is trained on, or anything really vs just looking at a map.

Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

#44

Post by nephihaha »

A couple of obvious observations: * Does not include Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man, both of which have notable rail networks (as they are not in GB). * Does not include heritage railways. There are a number of other railways on here which are not marked but offer tourist travel.

Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

#45

Post by Liquid_Fire »

frnz wrote: post #36
Liquid_Fire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are giving it to them. That's why the demo asks for your location permission, and that's why the API expects location info. "You" here means another app that integrates their API (or you as an individual using the demo on their website). How the other app gets it is up to the other app - ideally it also just queries it directly and requires location permission.

so an empty train does not show up?

Not sure how you came to that conclusion. An empty train would still exist in the live train data. It does not depend on mobile phones, but on rail signals and other such tracking built into the rail infrastructure.

Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

#47

Post by amelius »

vaillancourtmax wrote: post #7
AJRF wrote: post #3

> Signalbox's technology identifies the train a device is on by matching a snapshot of smartphone data to a train’s trajectory data. The technology uses advanced algorithms works even with severely degraded data. We are able to pinpoint a smartphone to any type of train without background location tracking or hardware. Hmm, that's...interesting?

Seems similar to Transit's approach: https://blog.transitapp.com/go-underground/

Meanwhile, other engineers are working on reducing the vibrations.

Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

#48

Post by windowliker »

maelito wrote: post #6

Checkout the French equivalent : https://carto.tchoo.net . Looks more complete. Past similar HN submission got no attention, whereas the UK's top page. Interesting ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249351

That's no surprise. The French equivalent of anything rail related is always more complete than the UK.
Post reply on HN