On 30 Oct 2015, at 12:00, Juhani Pirttilahti <
juhani.pi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There might be another 1E06 running, or cancelled, by freight operating company. In some occassions, there isn't. Sometimes TD feed just sticks to an obfuscated headcode for no apparent reason while the Train Movement feed is still running with the "real" head code.
Can you share where the TD feed is using and obfuscated head code but the train movement feed isn’t? I can have a look in to why this is.
> Personally, I'm all against this whole obfuscation thing because it's just scrambling the data and confusing us without any apparent benefit to companies. There are now multiple open sources for train service codes and service groups which do connect individual services to companies. Therefore it isn't the headcode that should be obfuscated. This is just my opinion though.
The freight operating companies (except GBRf who are happy for their data to be open) are nervous about having data on their trains made wholly public. For this reason, when a train operated by a freight operator is ‘activated’ on TRUST, its reporting number is scrambled to keep the class the same, but the other three characters different. Similarly, with the CIF and JSON data, the service code is removed, as is the train category and reporting number.
The freight industry is happy with this - unlike passenger operators, freight doesn’t fall under a ‘public interest’ test because it’s purely commercial. You could argue that freight movements interact with passenger train movements, but the data out there is - I think - enough to work with.
To get this changed, we need to come up with a compelling argument to do so. Here are some examples of arguments for, and counter-arguments to illustrate that it’s not a simple case of “we want it, therefore we should have it":
Argument: GB Railfreight have allowed their data to be opened up and nothing bad has happened to their trains
Counter-argument: That’s their decision, our business is different
Argument: It’s possible to work out who operates each train anyway, so you might as well make it all open
Counter-argument: We’ll require that the data is further obfuscated to make it wholly impossible to do so - possibly even having all our train movement data removed from the public feeds
Argument: WTT schedules are in the Working Timetable which Network Rail publish, so they should be un-obfuscated in the feeds
Counter-argument: Many of those WTT schedules don’t always run
If you, or anyone else, can come up with a robust argument *for* making all the freight movement data go out in the clear, I’m happy to get this issue re-addressed.
Peter