Hello,
I commute between Waterloo and Epsom, and have noticed a couple of interesting things about the real-time information provided online by the websites of National Rail and the TOCs.
First, it's sometimes wrong and out of sync with the info displayed on the screens (platform and concourse). What typically happens is that the web sites will state that a train is on time even when it hasn't actually arrived at the platform by the scheduled departure time, then it will be displayed as a couple of minutes late, then another couple, then another couple, and so on until it finally departs.
The impression I get is that: (1) sometimes the length of the delay is unknown, but whoever's in charge is reluctant to say so online and would prefer to guess; and (2) there is a problem conveying the actual existence of the delay in real time to the web sites that display this data.
Second, and possibly related to the above, the NR web site has recently lost the ability to display platform information:
"Due to an issue with industry data we are unable to show platform information"
This has been going on for a few weeks now so it's not a typical one-off outage. My best guess is that someone's implemented an IT change that's had an unintended side-effect (these things happen) and decided that it's a sufficiently small problem that passengers can live with it for a while.
What interests me, as someone who works in IT but has no specific rail knowledge beyond the average commuter, is that I would expect the difficult bit to be the business of reacting to timetable exceptions and devising new schedules on the fly when things go wrong. Once the decisions have been made and the timetable amendments have been plotted - which must happen, because the information ends up on the departure boards at the stations - I would expect the work of shovelling that data over to the web sites to be non-trivial but certainly not the hardest part of the enterprise.
All of which is a wildly verbose way of asking: does anyone know how the provision of real-time info works, and who is responsible for it?
I commute between Waterloo and Epsom, and have noticed a couple of interesting things about the real-time information provided online by the websites of National Rail and the TOCs.
First, it's sometimes wrong and out of sync with the info displayed on the screens (platform and concourse). What typically happens is that the web sites will state that a train is on time even when it hasn't actually arrived at the platform by the scheduled departure time, then it will be displayed as a couple of minutes late, then another couple, then another couple, and so on until it finally departs.
The impression I get is that: (1) sometimes the length of the delay is unknown, but whoever's in charge is reluctant to say so online and would prefer to guess; and (2) there is a problem conveying the actual existence of the delay in real time to the web sites that display this data.
Second, and possibly related to the above, the NR web site has recently lost the ability to display platform information:
"Due to an issue with industry data we are unable to show platform information"
This has been going on for a few weeks now so it's not a typical one-off outage. My best guess is that someone's implemented an IT change that's had an unintended side-effect (these things happen) and decided that it's a sufficiently small problem that passengers can live with it for a while.
What interests me, as someone who works in IT but has no specific rail knowledge beyond the average commuter, is that I would expect the difficult bit to be the business of reacting to timetable exceptions and devising new schedules on the fly when things go wrong. Once the decisions have been made and the timetable amendments have been plotted - which must happen, because the information ends up on the departure boards at the stations - I would expect the work of shovelling that data over to the web sites to be non-trivial but certainly not the hardest part of the enterprise.
All of which is a wildly verbose way of asking: does anyone know how the provision of real-time info works, and who is responsible for it?