Which way should I be going with feeds? I see history of updates!

[Trevor Diamond]

Hi all — trying to build a little personal project - live position tracker on top of TD/Train Movements/VSTP, freshly subscribed via the Rail Data Marketplace (not the old publicdatafeeds.networkrail.co.uk portal). The older wiki pages describe STOMP/OpenWire/AMQP for these feeds, but I've seen at least one recent post here mentioning Kafka for Train Movements specifically. For a brand-new RDM subscription today, is Kafka the current/recommended way to connect, or is STOMP still the primary path for TD and Train Movements specifically (as opposed to Darwin)? Is one of them being phased out? Also — for TD, is the area (e.g. Q3/Q4) something you choose at subscription time, or only once you're actually connected and picking topics? Thanks!

[Sarah Pawton]

Hi,

All feeds through the RDM are Kafka, and the connection information is found in the "Pub/Sub" tab of the data product page. You cannot use STOMP/OpenWire/AMQP for these, they are for the old feeds.

Ostensibly the RDM feeds are what new users should be using.

Not entirely sure what you mean by Q3/Q4 but the RDM TD feed will contain train movements for the whole country if I remember correctly. I believe there is just one topic in the RDM feed.

Sarah

On Wed, 12 Aug 2026, 18:19 Trevor Diamond, <trevori...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all — trying to build a little personal project - live position tracker on top of TD/Train Movements/VSTP, freshly subscribed via the Rail Data Marketplace (not the old publicdatafeeds.networkrail.co.uk portal). The older wiki pages describe STOMP/OpenWire/AMQP for these feeds, but I've seen at least one recent post here mentioning Kafka for Train Movements specifically. For a brand-new RDM subscription today, is Kafka the current/recommended way to connect, or is STOMP still the primary path for TD and Train Movements specifically (as opposed to Darwin)? Is one of them being phased out? Also — for TD, is the area (e.g. Q3/Q4) something you choose at subscription time, or only once you're actually connected and picking topics? Thanks!

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[Peter Hicks]

Hi Trevor

On Wednesday, 12 August 2026 at 18:19, Trevor Diamond <trevori...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all — trying to build a little personal project - live position tracker on top of TD/Train Movements/VSTP, freshly subscribed via the Rail Data Marketplace (not the old publicdatafeeds.networkrail.co.uk portal). The older wiki pages describe STOMP/OpenWire/AMQP for these feeds, but I've seen at least one recent post here mentioning Kafka for Train Movements specifically. For a brand-new RDM subscription today, is Kafka the current/recommended way to connect, or is STOMP still the primary path for TD and Train Movements specifically (as opposed to Darwin)? Is one of them being phased out? Also — for TD, is the area (e.g. Q3/Q4) something you choose at subscription time, or only once you're actually connected and picking topics?

RDM users Kafka and at the moment, only Kafka - Stomp and OpenWire aren't available.  I won't comment on whether they should be available(!). You don't need to subscribe to individual 'areas' at all - you get a feed of all TD data, without any filtering.  In 2026, systems are powerful enough and bandwidth plentiful enough for users to do their own filtering if they need it.

Whether you go with publidatafeeds.networkrail.co.uk or feeds via the RDM in JSON format, you can be assured that the TRUST, TD and VSTP feeds are not going away any time soon.  At some point, I imagine they will move on to the RDM entirely and that will be the only way to subscribe, but if anyone tries to deprecate the feeds, or the feeds in the format they're in, I will be first to make a very strong case for giving plenty of notice...!

Best wishes,

Peter

[Trevor Diamond]

Thanks!

T

[Andrew Larcombe]

There was a discussion about this recently on this list. My experience is that it's difficult because TD has far from nationwide coverage (and you'll have to map TD points to real world locations - which has multiple rabbit holes, eg that the section of track being entered can be miles long, and you'll need to watch them going between TD areas).

The other data source could be Darwin, but that's only per-station, so you'll possibly end up doing some more dead-reckoning/estimation based on historical journeys for the same train class.

Plenty of foot-guns, but plenty of fun to be had!

Thanks,

Andrew

On Wed, 12 Aug 2026, 18:19 Trevor Diamond, <trevori...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all — trying to build a little personal project - live position tracker on top of TD/Train Movements/VSTP, freshly subscribed via the Rail Data Marketplace (not the old publicdatafeeds.networkrail.co.uk portal). The older wiki pages describe STOMP/OpenWire/AMQP for these feeds, but I've seen at least one recent post here mentioning Kafka for Train Movements specifically. For a brand-new RDM subscription today, is Kafka the current/recommended way to connect, or is STOMP still the primary path for TD and Train Movements specifically (as opposed to Darwin)? Is one of them being phased out? Also — for TD, is the area (e.g. Q3/Q4) something you choose at subscription time, or only once you're actually connected and picking topics? Thanks!

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