It's pretty good, my 16 y.o. son will be stuck in it for many hours. I like that you can select a train and see its stops. It would be equally awesome to select a station and see the train arrivals/departures board.
Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
91–100 of 165 posts
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#92The surveillance is... quite disturbing.
edit: /s
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#93The surveillance is... quite disturbing. edit: /s
How is it surveillance for an organization that operates a fleet of trains, to know where the trains are?
Even if there were no such thing as GPS, simply the act of running a fleet of trains or trucks or buses on a schedule, means that anyone could do a bit of math and roughly calculate the position of every vehicle based solely on the schedule.
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#94The surveillance is... quite disturbing. edit: /s
How? Knowing the location of trains is pretty important.
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#95Indian equivalent: https://railradar.in/railradar
I'm obviously biased as an India, but this is the best implementation. Very dense, yet, easier on the eyes.
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#96The surveillance is... quite disturbing. edit: /s
This information is derived from open signalling data, which the signalling system _has_ to track to operate trains safely and identify their locations.
The reality is the illusion of pinpoint accuracy is a figment of this site's imagination; this site is using some creative license to guess the precise location of trains.
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#97Would 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.
I've tried building one of these and the answer is - it's difficult.
There is a message queue that you can use to identify the last reported location of a train. Depending on the line you could get a pretty accurate real-time map (but first you need to georeference all of the location identifiers to eastings/northings.)
But many lines report only the last movement at a station stop - these are mostly in rural areas so the best approach seems to be to build some sort of dead-reckoning network taking into account train type and network utilisation.
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sol…
> If trains were made cheaper, some of them would become extremely unpleasant to use.
Yes, it is a fact of modern life that one reason there's no political will to reduce ticket prices is that it's an effective pricing mechanism for limiting demand or pushing travellers to other modes of transport to avoid further overcrowding – as perverse as that sounds for a rail network.
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#99[deleted]
Re: Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network
#100Very nice! I’m making one for NYC subway. It’s still in-progress and animations need a lot more work. Next steps was to adjust the size and overlay it on a proper map. https://donohoe.dev/subway/map/
This is great - thank you! There is no background map (Firefox) but its still very clear and fun.
PS. If you are taking a feature request, I immediately double-clicked on my line to try to focus only on that (i.e. hide all the other lines). So that might be useful for others.