There are some strong assumptions in the last few posts that are completely off mark.
There
are some operators that do not wish this information to be shared to the degree that we show in RTT. Most of the TOCs not included is due to certain senior staff being disinterested and preferring to do their own thing outside of any existing industry process. I specifically say 'most' - it is not all operators, and as I said above the current list is not the final one.
It's worth pointing out that an industry system for opening up train allocations already exists. It's called Connecting Train Identifiers (CTI), and it went live in 2019. However, because operators raised unjustified concerns over security, it wasn't made public in a last minute u-turn. There are a number of people in the "open rail data" community who are not happy about this - myself included - especially given that most operators are now suddenly happy to hand this data over to RTT.
I wasn't particularly impressed when that occurred either and from my understanding it wasn't particularly last minute either. I find it quite interesting that little use of that feed is being made in a public arena.
To pick up specifically why that data is being made available to us now, the data that we do have isn't perfect and it's nowhere near as good as what CTI should be. It is half of the puzzle. In an ideal world the underlying data should be open to everyone, and we've now knocked down the argument about security or whatever nonsense the industry wants to come up with. It's happening for various small reasons that have all compounded, and RTT does now have a significant amount of traffic coming to it (in the millions of users) which does benefit us. I have made pushes inside the industry to get this data released now we have it - but I've had to put that on a backburner on the last 6-12 months as I've had to concentrate on delivering R&D work for NR.
To summarise: why would TOCs introduce additional systems and infrastructure to complete a function which another system already does?
With the exception of three operators, no TOC has introduced any additional services or systems to distribute this data to us. We have done all the rest of the systems work at our end and we have a lot of different integrations we have to support now. We are also covering the entire cost of providing this service - so it's fairly win win for operators.