National Rail website - station plans

[YellowBrick]

Can anyone tell me how the online station maps on National Rail are such a catastrophe? They used to be fairly decent.

Now there seem to be two styles, and neither is actually legibile, even if you click the "View larger". The platform numbers are a pixelated mess (JPEG compression artefacts; but they were never large enough in the first place) and the icons are tiny and blurry.

2d overhead

Find a Station | National Rail

You can find information about every single National Rail served station in Great Britain – and there are 2,589 of them! From facilities to access information, ticket buying and collection, onward travel and more helpful knowledge.

www.nationalrail.co.uk

"cool" 3d view that's even worse

https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/images/content/York%20station%20plan.jpg

How is anyone supposed to use these?

 

[AlbertBeale]

Can anyone tell me how the online station maps on National Rail are such a catastrophe? They used to be fairly decent.

Now there seem to be two styles, and neither is actually legibile, even if you click the "View larger". The platform numbers are a pixelated mess (JPEG compression artefacts; but they were never large enough in the first place) and the icons are tiny and blurry.

2d overhead

Find a Station | National Rail

You can find information about every single National Rail served station in Great Britain – and there are 2,589 of them! From facilities to access information, ticket buying and collection, onward travel and more helpful knowledge.

www.nationalrail.co.uk

"cool" 3d view that's even worse

https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/images/content/York%20station%20plan.jpg

How is anyone supposed to use these?

They're hopeless - full of detail/clutter about which coffee outlet is which and so on. If they can't provide anything clear and functional I'm not sure why they bother.

 

[Joe Paxton]

The King's Cross plan is just a poor image taken from the Network Rail PDF 'station map' - KX being a Network Rail managed station.

However I doubt most people looking for info head to the 'Our stations' page of the Network Rail website.


Meanwhile I've no idea where the hopeless '3D' view of York has come from (it doesn't seem to be from LNER).

 

[brad465]

Can anyone tell me how the online station maps on National Rail website became are such a catastrophe? They used to be fairly decent.

Fixed it for you.

 

[bengley]

They also used to show images of the parts of the station when you moused over or clicked on various points - now they don't.

 

[gaillark]

Can anyone tell me how the online station maps on National Rail are such a catastrophe? They used to be fairly decent.

Now there seem to be two styles, and neither is actually legibile, even if you click the "View larger". The platform numbers are a pixelated mess (JPEG compression artefacts; but they were never large enough in the first place) and the icons are tiny and blurry.

2d overhead

Find a Station | National Rail

You can find information about every single National Rail served station in Great Britain – and there are 2,589 of them! From facilities to access information, ticket buying and collection, onward travel and more helpful knowledge.

www.nationalrail.co.uk

"cool" 3d view that's even worse

https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static/images/content/York%20station%20plan.jpg

How is anyone supposed to use these?

I complained about the poor quality mapping back in early 2021 and below are the two responses recieved from the Officer responsible at RDG:



The original maps were created by an external supplier through a direct contract with government funding. I have been unable to establish why the funding was withdrawn but we were allowed to retain the maps on our site indefinitely.

Several train companies created new station maps primarily for their own websites and at their own expense and then either freely submitted them to the National Rail Enquiries website or we asked specifically if we could use them. Whilst the maps will match the style of their own websites, I have acknowledged that it presents an inconsistent style on NRE but that accuracy is the more important consideration.

I did not say that the hotspots were useful - instead, I described some of the main issues with them. However, the ability to add them to any style map is still there if the train company chooses to add them. We do not have the resources to go out and photograph every station, upload and continually maintain them but we do provide the infrastructure for the train companies to do so if they wish.

RDG is funded by the train companies and works to deliver what our members ask us to focus on. Unfortunately, there is currently no budget to create new maps - a situation that under the current economic circumstances does not look likely to change for the foreseeable future.


Regards,

Paul



The original Stations Made Easy maps (the Blackheath example) were produced several years ago using a supplier that created and maintained them including the 'hotspots' [the hover-over text and photo boxes]. Unfortunately, we lost our government funding and parted ways with the supplier that produced them. Without the supporting infrastructure to maintain them going forward, they began to fall out of date and a new and much cheaper solution needed to be found.


The National Rail Enquiries website is a collaborative effort across Britian's rail industry - whilst Rail Delivery Group provides much of the content and manages the site infrastructure overall, it also provides a hosting platform for the train companies to own and directly maintain certain sections, overseen and regulated by RDG in terms of content approval.


Many of the original station maps had become so far out of date as to be totally inaccurate. The Grantham map is an example of one of the new maps supplied by that station's facilities operator, LNER. Other train companies have also submitted and published new style and up to date maps for their stations as well. Where a train company has not supplied a new map for a station that requires one - or where they have approached RDG for support in creating a new one, we (RDG) have found another supplier that can produce new station maps and you mention Leagrave which is an example of this. Whilst this does mean that the visual styles of station map now vary, sometimes quite considerably, between stations and operators and does not necessarily provide the visual consistency that it used to, we considered that accuracy is the more important consideration.


Any new map submitted does still retain the ability to have the aforementioned 'hotspots' added if the train company has content to add and chooses to do so - but historically we have found that the hotspots are very high maintenance, frequently go out-of-date as stations are upgraded and improved and could often be a hinderance to page download speeds or viewing on different browsers or mobile devices. The NRE website is undergoing a huge transformation to rebuild and deliver a fresh new user experience and the station pages and their maps will be part of that upgrade.


Whilst on the subject of maps and accessibility, if you were not already aware we do have a relatively new interactive National Rail Accessibility map which plots every National Rail station in geographical context and has frequently updated text content relating to accessibility arrangements for each location. A further enhancement will soon add live operational status updates relating to lift and escalator as well.




Regards,

Paul

 

[Howardh]

openstreetmap.org is a good alternative I find, as you can zoom in and out more information becomes available. As it's open source then you can't guarantee it's accuracy, but it's as good as anything and can also work for airport terminal buildings, bus stations etc. Here's their plan of afore mentioned York

 

[swt_passenger]

The original Stations Made Easy maps (the Blackheath example) were produced several years ago using a supplier that created and maintained them including the 'hotspots' [the hover-over text and photo boxes]. Unfortunately, we lost our government funding and parted ways with the supplier that produced them. Without the supporting infrastructure to maintain them going forward, they began to fall out of date and a new and much cheaper solution needed to be found.

It‘s interesting that they fiinally explained it like this, as that was my assumption when the question came up in the forums a few years ago. I had checked a couple of stations, and although the “hotpots” appeared to do something, every one of them went to a wrong photograph, as though a database of links had been shuffled!

E.g. Here: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/call-to-archive-national-rail-station-maps.185929/#post-4101641

 

[zero]

Completely agree the newer style maps are useless. I now rely on user-submitted photos on Google maps, but obviously it's highly variable whether someone has submitted a photograph of a part of a station that I want to know the layout of.

 

[Atishyou]

The original maps were done by an external company (as has been stated), approximately 10 years ago. They were quite good at the time, but ideally need updating regularly, especially as stations are remodelled and facilities change.

Common sense would say let the staff who update the site then make map updates.

 

[janb]

Completely agree the newer style maps are useless. I now rely on user-submitted photos on Google maps, but obviously it's highly variable whether someone has submitted a photograph of a part of a station that I want to know the layout of.

Northern have had Vextrix go round their stations and photograph so that you can "walk through" on Google Maps.