shawmat
Member
I'm the developer of timetableworld.com. The website has been ticking away since 2008 – and from 2016 in the background on my home server. It turns out that a lot of people are visiting it – 40,000 per month. Who knew? I didn’t; I didn’t look.
A question for the Forum: Would there be sufficient appetite for a major revamp?
The original aim was to connect historical mapping of railways to historical timetables. My vision for the site changed as reality intruded but I think the site could be repurposed as THE main (free) archive for historical public transport timetables (rail, bus, metro, tram etc). A quick Google search for “train timetable collectors” brings timetableworld.com to the top – despite zero promo effort from me.
Maybe it’d be worth sharing how we got here.
History of timetableworld.com
Google Maps and Google Earth were fairly new in 2008, and I was wowed by the experience of being able to follow former rail-tracks on the ground (via a satellite image). At the same time, exploring timetables gave me the problem of – where is this place? What was the story behind the services in the timetable?
It seemed like a simple indexing problem to connect the two.
I was a very IT-literate analyst for a city bank, part of a small front-office team that provided a portfolio analysis tool to pension funds. I programmed all day. The emerging open-source software movement around 2005-2007 sounded interesting and, when made redundant in the credit crunch of 2007/8, I took the opportunity to learn some new skills.
timetableworld.com was the result. It looks stale today but the underlying technology - developed by volunteers as grad projects – still stands up rather well.
It turned out to be way-too-much work for one person – more of which later - but once I was back into employment other priorities took over.
What’s involved?
Publishing, indexing and geolocating timetable data involves several separate disciplines. Trying to do all these myself was over-ambitious but could be OK for a small team to do.
Working alone was unsustainable as the number of books went from dozens to hundreds. I still have dozens of partly complete timetable projects to get over the line.
Update
IT innovations continues to move quickly – very! Since retiring in 2016, I’ve had the time to get back up-to-date and, I think, stay there. A few interesting-ish outcomes for my home town of Maidenhead are:
https://atamuseum.org/collection/ (requires free registration to get the full experience)
https://collection.maidenheadheritage.org.uk/side-by-side-map-maidenhead.php - historical maps
https://maidenheadac.org – a simple Wordpress example
https://collection.maidenheadheritage.org.uk/then-and-now-demo.php - images
https://mnf.org.uk/he-listings-maidenhead.php - interactive maps using open data
Relaunching
Is it possible to assemble a small team to try again?
I’m happy to manage the whole work if there are volunteers willing to:
Your thoughts
A question for the Forum: Would there be sufficient appetite for a major revamp?
The original aim was to connect historical mapping of railways to historical timetables. My vision for the site changed as reality intruded but I think the site could be repurposed as THE main (free) archive for historical public transport timetables (rail, bus, metro, tram etc). A quick Google search for “train timetable collectors” brings timetableworld.com to the top – despite zero promo effort from me.
Maybe it’d be worth sharing how we got here.
History of timetableworld.com
Google Maps and Google Earth were fairly new in 2008, and I was wowed by the experience of being able to follow former rail-tracks on the ground (via a satellite image). At the same time, exploring timetables gave me the problem of – where is this place? What was the story behind the services in the timetable?
It seemed like a simple indexing problem to connect the two.
I was a very IT-literate analyst for a city bank, part of a small front-office team that provided a portfolio analysis tool to pension funds. I programmed all day. The emerging open-source software movement around 2005-2007 sounded interesting and, when made redundant in the credit crunch of 2007/8, I took the opportunity to learn some new skills.
timetableworld.com was the result. It looks stale today but the underlying technology - developed by volunteers as grad projects – still stands up rather well.
It turned out to be way-too-much work for one person – more of which later - but once I was back into employment other priorities took over.
What’s involved?
Publishing, indexing and geolocating timetable data involves several separate disciplines. Trying to do all these myself was over-ambitious but could be OK for a small team to do.
- Scanning whole timetable books. I built my own book scanner for that, using two basic cameras. You can build you own too using https://www.diybookscanner.org/ but, nowadays, a personal high-speed book scanner is emerging as a consumer product
- Cleaning the scanned images - to whiten them, straighten them and remove speckles – is a software process, a little slow but improvable
- Using OCR (optical character recognition) to read the index pages
- Detailed data processing to connect images to an index of stations, and to geolocate the stations for use on a map
- Image processing to make image retrieval fast, however far the user zoomed or panned
- A website to present the results and take user interactions.
Working alone was unsustainable as the number of books went from dozens to hundreds. I still have dozens of partly complete timetable projects to get over the line.
Update
IT innovations continues to move quickly – very! Since retiring in 2016, I’ve had the time to get back up-to-date and, I think, stay there. A few interesting-ish outcomes for my home town of Maidenhead are:
https://atamuseum.org/collection/ (requires free registration to get the full experience)
https://collection.maidenheadheritage.org.uk/side-by-side-map-maidenhead.php - historical maps
https://maidenheadac.org – a simple Wordpress example
https://collection.maidenheadheritage.org.uk/then-and-now-demo.php - images
https://mnf.org.uk/he-listings-maidenhead.php - interactive maps using open data
Relaunching
Is it possible to assemble a small team to try again?
I’m happy to manage the whole work if there are volunteers willing to:
- Offer their timetable collections for scanning
- Scan timetables page by page with great care
- Help with the post-cleaning and OCR steps.
Your thoughts
- Is it worth doing?
- Can you help, and commit sufficient time and effort?
- Would you suggest taking the project in a different direction?