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Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

map.signalbox.io

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

#81

Post by greengreengrass »

scoot wrote: post #51

I live next to a railway line so I'm in the (not particularly unique, and definitely not enviable) position to compare what's on the map to "IRL" trains, and I can tell you it's as good as useless. - Trains appearing on the map that aren't anywhere to be seen on the tracks. - Trains on the tracks that don't appear on the map. - Trains moving away from the station that according to the timetable view shouldn't have le…

There's no way its input data is anywhere near adequate for the rate the position indicators refresh, so it's taking some base data and then just... guessing the rest.

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

#84

Post by pjc50 »

bcraven wrote: post #14
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what app has allow location on all the time and is feeding them their data

"Acquired by Trainline in 2023, Signalbox works with organisations across the rail ecosystem to improve customer information and operational awareness." https://www.signalbox.io/news/southeastern-launches-track-my...

So, we don't know if this is the case, but one way to do this is not to ask the phones but the cells. The mobile network has to know where the phones are by cell; the cells are often small relative to the speed of the train; there are also cells installed specifically to improve service on trains, or provide a base station to the train wifi, or for communications to railway staff.

If you get a bunch of phones switching cell near simultaneously, you can tell that a train movement across the cell boundary has probably happened. Then correlate that with the other data feed about train blocks, and bob's your uncle.

Only about 50% of trains have wifi: https://www.businesstravelnewseurope.com/Ground-Transport/UK... ; but it's easy to imagine getting the mobile hotspot on the train to share its GPS location as well.

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

#85

Post by dofm »

Paul_S wrote: post #67

I can tell it's not accurate because it has half the trains marked as on time. Reality is far more depressing. You'd also need to add ghostly white for cancelled and bus icons for replacement buses. Why do I live here god. Why can't we have a functional train network like literally any other civilised country.

More than half of British trains do run exactly on time (within the scheduled minute). It's quite high — over 65%. Over 85% arrive within three.

It's a bit massaged in some cases e.g. Transpennine, who have only recently been forced to stop abusing P-coding to pre-cancel trains that would have been significantly delayed. So I think those figures may take a dip.

But re: civilised countries: Germany's rail service is effectively significantly less punctual than ours; regional services are OK, about as good as ours, but if you need a longer haul service for any part of your journey you will have a very much worse experience. France is a bit more punctual on long-haul, I think; they average better within-the-minute punctuality on TGV, but regionally it is not better than the UK, it is worse. Italy (in some senses the most civilised country on earth) has poor train reliability.

Delays on UK networks are in many case due to very fundamental, long term issues that are hard to resolve. Rural lines that are single-track for geographic reasons, for example — where it's a choice of either single track or no train. And there are some absolutely pathological problems like the Borough Market Junction, which has been a cause of severe structural delays for about 140 years, in part because the only way to solve it is to destroy historic parts of London.

I personally do not think delays are the biggest problem in UK rail; ticket prices are. The slow return of train services to various forms of public ownership may help there, but we need the ROSCOs too. We need to stop what privatisation did. Perhaps we will.

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

#86

Post by pjc50 »

butz wrote: post #83

It would be amazing if someone could visualize this data in Railroad Tycoon or Transport Tycoon game engine.

Someone's already done the UK as an OpenTTD map: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Community/Scenarios/United%20Kin... , although I suspect that one cell =~ 100m makes it hard to accurately represent the real train density.

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

#89

Post by ErroneousBosh »

iso1631 wrote: post #59
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This map is for the UK, not the US. We don't have ICE here.

It's a reference to the murder of Henry Nowak, a sad example of knife crime which exists in the uk, and of individual police officers who failed to render basic first aid. The family not only lost their son, but then had to see his name used to further the global hatred of the farage types

What's that got to do with "arresting people for the crime of being white"?

That's a pretty common racist dogwhistle, propagated by groups like Farage's Russian owner.

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

#90

Post by ifwinterco »

dofm wrote: post #85
Paul_S wrote: post #67

I can tell it's not accurate because it has half the trains marked as on time. Reality is far more depressing. You'd also need to add ghostly white for cancelled and bus icons for replacement buses. Why do I live here god. Why can't we have a functional train network like literally any other civilised country.

More than half of British trains do run exactly on time (within the scheduled minute). It's quite high — over 65%. Over 85% arrive within three. It's a bit massaged in some cases e.g. Transpennine, who have only recently been forced to stop abusing P-coding to pre-cancel trains that would have been significantly delayed. So I think those figures may take a dip. But re: civilised countries: Germany's rail service is e…

Some ticket prices are crazy, but the issue is a lot of trains are already very busy especially at the weekends, even with those prices.

If trains were made cheaper, some of them would become extremely unpleasant to use. In an ideal world, we'd have both more capacity on the busy routes and cheaper tickets, but that will need a lot more work than just nationalising the train companies.

(Or just fewer people would solve all these problems, but that doesn't look likely to happen...)

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