Missing stations on Realtime Trains

Hi everyone,

I was at Rugeley Trent Valley doing train photography on Sunday and using Realtime Trains to determine at what time trains would be passing through.

While using the site I noticed that, while Virgin Trains services to London Euston were showing as passing through the station, ones from London Euston were not. This in spite of the fact that trains actually were passing through and, looking at individual services, were showing as passing through the points both before and after RGL but not the station itself.

Does anyone know why this is?

I’d hazard a guess that it’s because Rugeley Trent Valley isn’t a mandatory timing point.

Realtime Trains does a good job at extrapolating passing times at other stations. But in this case for some reason it hasn’t done so.

Be interesting to discover why!

i had this response to a similar issue I had once, from Mark at Freightmaster, for a train that shot past me near Hatfield Peveral that I couldn't see on RTT when searching by Hatfield Peveral. Not sure if it applies in this instance, but it might help....

"On routes such as the GEML, there are only a few locations which
are 'mandatory timing points' for non-stop trains such as freight
services and test trains and as you might imagine, Hatfield Peveral
is not such a location!

RTT attempts to fix this shortcoming by very cleverly 'inserting' passing
times between mandatory passing points on the day, but for various reasons,
this doesn't always work correctly, so if you want to be absolutely sure
of seeing a listing of all trains, you need to select the nearest mandatory
location (Witham in this case)."

This essentially happens in two circumstances:

• Where it simply doesn't know about a TIPLOC which is a mandatory timing point in the schedule, and it can't extrapolate between things it doesn't know about
• Where the running speed between two mandatory timing points calculates as faster than the timing load speed of the path. WCML trains near Cheddington on the northbound used to be affected by this, as the speed between Tring and Ledburn worked out to something around 153mph...

Have a look on TigerIris a lot of stations missing massive compared to RTT.

Rugeley North Jn is the mandatory timing point. The 153mph between Tring and Ledburn sounds odd as the SRT doesn't match that. There should be plenty of locations where that happens if so due to rounding on the SRT.

The Planner said:

The 153mph between Tring and Ledburn sounds odd as the SRT doesn't match that. There should be plenty of locations where that happens if so due to rounding on the SRT.

Click to expand...

This is a while ago now and the SRT has been changed - I seem to recall it affected 390 paths only, and there is some tolerance either way (it'll permit a small 3% margin increase, and will also add 30 seconds if it sees fit to try and make it pass validation after the Tring-Ledburn problem).

Either way, it's now on the massive pile of things to look at which will be sorted in due course...