simpletraintimes.co.uk

[paul.al...@gmail.com]

Check out http://simpletraintimes.co.uk/

A simple way to quickly check departure board information.

I put it together because I wanted something really quick and light while on the move, and I really wanted my trains sorted by arrival time!

It's nothing particularly groundbreaking, but I hope some find it useful.

I'd welcome your feedback and comments.

Cheers,
Paul.

[Linus Norton]

Very nice. One feature request - can you do some push state magic so that the URL gets re-written after entering the origin and destination. It would be nice to be able to go to http://simpletraintimes.co.uk/PDW/WAE and have the fields preloaded.

[petermount]

If you want an example on how to do this, I'm doing just that in the next version of departureboards.mobi

e.g. http://uat.departureboards.mobi/MDE for Maidstone East & the page does the parsing 

SRC: https://github.com/peter-mount/departureboards/blob/master/web/public_html/js/departure.js

One day I'll get time to finish off that rewrite & make it live.

[paul.al...@gmail.com]

I'll definitely look into push stage magic this weekend.

If it's your regular journey it saves the stations in local storage, so you don't have to put them in every time.

If you have a few regular journeys, then it handles URL search parameters like this:
http://simpletraintimes.co.uk/#?from=pdw&to=wae

So you can create a few bookmarks that will select the stations for you.

Cheers,
Paul.

On Friday, 24 February 2017 11:13:42 UTC, Linus Norton wrote:

[paul.al...@gmail.com]

Thanks Peter, examples always help!

[Mike Flynn]

Hi Paul,

Very nice and does exactly what it says on the tin.

However, and please note, this is highly subjective, the main criticism I would give is the URL itself.  Maybe at a future point you want to add some bells and whistles, it's not going to be so simple any more?!  Tackling this issue early is best I'd say.

That said, it does also depends on your target audience and there will always be some people who really just want the train times and nothing else.  Hmm, thinking about it more maybe your domain isn't so bad after all :)  Certainly a great resource.

Regards,

Mike

[Paul Hulme]

Thanks Mike!

I'm fine with bells and whistles as long as they're unobtrusive.

I don't have plans to incorporate journey planning or other data sources like TRUST etc ... so if your commute has changes, or is multi-modal, then this won't meet your needs.

My goal was an app that just immediately shows the train times for my commute.

My other bugbear was having to navigate into details pages and do some mental arithmetic to figure out which train would get me home quickest!

So I sort by ETA by default :)

I did have station announcements in there, but I took them out because I felt they were just getting in the way.

I care about upgrades, closures and lift maintenance ... but not at the instant when I'm checking a departure board ;)

[Rail Ale Fan]

My other bugbear was having to navigate into details pages and do some mental arithmetic to figure out which train would get me home quickest!

So I sort by ETA by default :)

If you weren't bothered about seeing all services OpenLDBWS.GetFastestDepartures() should just return the quickest services, looks like Huxley proxy supports it...
 

[Mike Flynn]

simplytraintimes.co.uk (and .com) is still available?!  If I were you, and if you're quick, I'd register this as well and allow forwarding.  Cost an extra tenner a year, of course.  Maybe after the year you don't want it anymore anyway.  Sorry to go on about it, just that I, rightly or wrongly, associate simple with stupid.  A bit like "cheap" domains.  But it's actually a good quality website.

Mike

[Paul Hulme]

I did have a look at that, but I like to see more than just one service ... especially if I'm a 5 minute walk away and likely to miss the next train.

It's great if you're actually at the station ... but just my luck there's no signal on the Thameslink platforms at St Pancras!

[Paul Hulme]

I'm happy with simple :)

[Andrew Black]

Sometimes the quickest service is also the most full.  If you can't get on it it isn't the quickest!

[petermount]

That is true. For me I could catch the 07:32 MDE-VIC as thats the Fast service but as it's only a 6 car (465/466 pair) it's rammed. Instead I aim for the 0743 to VIC is better - 8 Car 377's that's way more comfortable & even has tables!

So showing the next few is usually a good idea.

[djbur...@gmail.com]

So perhaps knowing how many vehicles, and even of which class, are actually in each service (rather than the planned number/class of vehicles) would be useful additional open data, to tie this to another thread?

[petermount]

As stated elsewhere in this group, length is an available field but not usually populated as most toc's CIS don't support it.

As for class, again https://groups.google.com/d/msg/openraildata-talk/T8jMmGEDAs8/jfvF-zRgDAAJ 

The short answer to this is unfortunately no. Train "consist" data, i.e. which rolling stock is being used for which particular service, is not open.

Getting that open would be nice but I have a feeling that one wouldn't be as simple as just making the data public.

[Paul Hulme]

I thought I saw somewhere on here that Darwin would soon be providing Train Loading Information. The same data that the Thameslink Class 700s use for their on train displays:

http://www.railwaygazette.com/uploads/pics/tn_gb-gtr-class700-train-loading-display.jpg

If this is made available then the number of carriages would be part of it.

Cheers,

    Paul.

[petermount]

Yes but (from other offline conversations) that'll only be for the 700's. Older classes do the loading differently and others don't do it at all

[Peter Hicks]

Hi Paul

Darwin has the capability to show train length now - and it's up to individual TOC systems to populate the data.

I don't think it has the capability to show train loading information in the current Push Port schema used for Open Data, but I see this happening soon - again, where the TOC supplies data.

Peter

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[Paul Hulme]

Baby steps I suppose ...

Although, since I actually use the 700s quite a lot, I'll probably jump on it :)

[Paul Hulme]

Doh!

I must have missed it ... in the data I was looking at when building my app length was always 0, so I ignored it.

I've included it now, so where available it displays it in the expandable details rows.

Thanks!

[Paul Hulme]

I've implemented this now:

http://simpletraintimes.co.uk/fnb/to/clj

Would have been quicker if I wasn't ill this week.

I also wanted to do it "the Angular way" to be consistent with the rest of the code.

A little http server config, and nice clean URLs get passed through to the client.

Quite happy with it actually :)

Cheers,

    Paul.

On Friday, 24 February 2017 11:13:42 UTC, Linus Norton wrote:

[Paul Hulme]

Bit of refactoring ... code is less of a horrific hackfest now!

Check it out, feedback welcome:

https://github.com/paulhulme/simpletraintimes

Cheers,

    Paul.