Personally, I've never understood why they felt the need to scramble them in the first place. Obviously it stems from competitors getting information...
As Spartacus says, that's an urban myth, as all the FOCs have full access
to TRUST and TOPS, so can look up details of competitors' train services
to their heart's content; not just basic stuff like headcodes and tonnages,
but also commodities/dangerous goods, number of wagons loaded/empty
(including how many containers are on intermodal trains), the types of
wagons each train is using including any cripples, plus a huge amount
of other,
genuinely 'commercially sensitive' information!
but why is it fine to publish the times the train will leave its origin and arrive at its destination, including the times it will get to each place in between, yet the headcode is far too commercially sensitive to publish?
It's not the headcode
as such which needs to be kept secret,
it's simply that the FOCs (other than GBRf, obviously!) do not want
their trains to be easily identifiable/traceable, and scrambling the
headcode (and removing the FOC name too) is by far the easiest
way to achieve that.
Now I know that the origin/destination of freight services often contain the
name of the FOC, but that isn't
always the case, and even when they do,
they are not always accurate; a good example being trains to Whitemoor,
which say "Whitemoor yard GBRf" even when they are operated by Colas,
FHH or DRS!
It seems baffling to me that the thing that is only of use to those in the rail industry is hidden yet all the detailed timings are in the public domain. Does anyone know why the industry made this decision?
It's still down to "commercial sensitivity", but in a broader sense,
i.e. the transport/logistics sector as a whole, so the FOCs don't
want road/sea shipping companies to know how many trains each
of them operate on a given flow on a given day/week/month.
MARK
