S-Class Indications, 'CA' TD

[aradg...@gmail.com]

Hi all,
(skip to the second paragraph to get to the point)

Following the resignalling of the Ely area (under Cambridge PSB's train describer) in Christmas 2024, virtually all of the S-Class signalling data north of Cambridge North changed. This also affected included many of the indications echoed by the 'CA' TD. signalmaps.co.uk was soon updated to reflect the new mappings and Peter's OpenTrainTimes - Ely soon followed. I know this was a while ago, so it's probably old news for many, including myself(!)

So now -getting to the point- what bugs me is that there are several indications, not present in the worked out mappings on the wiki, but are visible in the OTT and signalmaps website, such as routes, all shunt signals and (only in the case of SignalMaps) TRTS indications. Are there some extra mappings worked out or (even better!) a new SOP table/ECS floating around, that hasn't been uploaded to the wiki? I'm speculating that its the latter of the two, since TRTS indications are available at Ely and Cambridge North on Signalmaps, which I believe are much more difficult to 'work out', compared to signals and routes. Either way, I can't find it on the wiki. Any help would be appreciated!

Many Thanks

- Arad  :)

(P.S: Any updates on network rail not releasing the technical documents for decoding the TD feed? Forgive me if I'm just beating a dead horse here)

[Peter Hicks]

Hello

On Friday, 1 August 2025 at 11:51, aradg...@gmail.com <aradg...@gmail.com> wrote:

So now -getting to the point- what bugs me is that there are several indications, not present in the worked out mappings on the wiki, but are visible in the OTT and signalmaps website, such as routes, all shunt signals and (only in the case of SignalMaps) TRTS indications. Are there some extra mappings worked out or (even better!) a new SOP table/ECS floating around, that hasn't been uploaded to the wiki? I'm speculating that its the latter of the two, since TRTS indications are available at Ely and Cambridge North on Signalmaps, which I believe are much more difficult to 'work out', compared to signals and routes. Either way, I can't find it on the wiki. Any help would be appreciated!

Network Rail are not currently releasing TD documentation under FOI or as Open Data because (as I understand it):

1. It is a very niche topic, requires a lot of knowledge to properly understand, and there are other things which have more of an impact
2. Documentation is supplied as-is by suppliers, sometimes as text files, sometimes as PDFs, sometimes as Word documents, sometimes as differences, sometimes as 'clean' files - there is no standardised format
3. TD documentation by itself is not very useful without signalling diagrams, which contain a lot of information that, if placed in the public domain, would place the operational railway at risk and it isn't the sort of thing that's easy to redact
4. There is no formally maintained, change-managed set of TD data for everything
5. There is an existing business process for giving legitimate organisations access to data, but this was locked down a couple of years ago after it started being leaked

The data on the wiki is either that which has been sourced legitimately from FOI requests, or worked out by hand.  None of it is version-controlled, not guaranteed to be up-to-date, may not even be correct.  There are some instances I've identified where S-Class mappings have been published that are straight from raw data, but I've dealt with that.

For the time being, and until I can convince the industry that it is​ possible to formally release this data in a standardised, formalised, change-managed and redactable (where necessary) way, I don't think there's going to be any movement.  And on point 1, I think there are better sets of data to get released than focusing on something that is very 'niche'.

Peter

[MothTrain]

Turns out my speculation that a new document (that wasn't on the wiki or whatdotheyknow ) was released, was in fact wrong! I definitely agree that documents pertaining to the TD feed are probably not the most relevant sets of data to try for right now, and other data could be much more valuable. Especially since network rail FOI made themselves quite clear a long time ago, that they were no longer releasing these documents because of understandable "raised security risks". Guess its back to working out this stuff by hand! I'll remain optimistic anyhow, good luck with your efforts :)

Thanks for your time and help! 

- Arad (The same person as before. Just -this time- I didn't forget to change my display name from my email: Rookie mistake !)