Real-time train locations coordinates in lat lon

[John Ulitin]

Hi all,

I've been looking through the wikis and apis provided by openraildata but did not find a way to get train locations directly in lat/lon or easting/northing with real-time updates.

Could you please guide me to the right way to track real-time train locations?

Thanks in advance for any help!

John

[Russell Bowman]

Hi,

I am 99.9% certain that such data is not available in any of the current datasets.  Indeed I'm not sure where the industry has got to on accessing such data itself. (Industry insiders will not doubt be able to tell us.)  Also I think there is a post from 12 / 18 months ago that included 'plans' (small 'p') for data including GPS positioning.  The best you can do right now is a station location (via the TRUST movement feed) and I think there are TIPLOC locations in the reference data.  I recall this data is incomplete and not always accurate.  The most granular location are the berth movements from the TD feed although I know of no dataset that positions them in a coordinate system.  (The SMART reference data provides the mapping of Berths to STANOXs/Stations although the TD berth event would (usually) be generated by a train passing a signal into / out of a section of track.)

Russell

[Russell Bowman]

I should add...

The train tracking websites I've looked at (and I have NOT looked at that many) are either working on logical berth maps (i.e. the train is in the berth but you don't know where within the berth) or extrapolating from known station events, and running times.

Russell

[Russell Bowman]

Goodness there needs to be an 'edit post' button...

That's not to say that cool things cannot be done with the existing data, especially when mixed with data from other sources.

[Evelyn Snow]

Hi hello

There's locational information available for most timing locations (from a
FOIA'd spreadsheet from Network Rail), and for all stations (DfT's NAPTAN),
which can be combined with movement/schedule information (from TRUST/schedule,
possibly Darwin if only passenger movements are of interest). There's some
other data sources which would be necessary to properly correspond these, and
this only gives you a train's real world progression between the timing
locations which actually have this location information.

Evelyn

2021-03-04T06:45:26-0800 John Ulitin <iv...@wikiroutes.info>:

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[John Ulitin]

Thank you for your help.

I've seen the stream for berth data with timestapms, they called TDs I believe in networkrail.

But where do you get these timing locations coordinates?

[Kyle Gordon]

I am merely an interested observer, but in the past I have used the data at https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php?title=File:TIPLOC_Eastings_and_Northings.xlsx.gz

Maybe that's of use to you?

Cheers

Kyle

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[Evelyn Snow]

Yep, this is the FOIAed data from Network Rail that I mentioned.

NAPTAN is available from http://naptan.dft.gov.uk/naptan/
I don't recall whether it contains TIPLOCs, it definitely has CRS codes however

Evelyn

2021-03-05T10:36:12+0000 Kyle Gordon <ky...@glasgownet.com>:

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[Peter Hicks]

I think NaPTAN and NPTG contain "stop codes" which are a four-digit ATCO (not ATOC) code and the TIPLOC - but that's only for rail stations rather than TIPLOCs which identify non-station locations, e.g. junctions.

Also, from memory, the latitude/longitude or easting/northing references tag the entrance to the station, not the position on the track.

Peter Hicks

Director

OpenTrainTimes Ltd.

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[Evelyn Snow]

TD might not be the best choice for this project, it's a very low level
API which tracks train movements between various signalling sections.
A relatively small proportion of those berths can be used to determine
that a train has arrived or departed a timing location, but this is more
or less what the TRUST feed offers you.

Evelyn

2021-03-05T02:03:54-0800 John Ulitin <iv...@wikiroutes.info>:

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/openraildata-talk/771c982d-bb03-443f-b78d-776c75a82f59n%40googlegroups.com.