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43055

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8 Mar 2018
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I appear to have been mistaken. I assumed those GWR buses would be a service operated by them (but obviously contracted to a bus operator) in the same way they c2c contract Ensign to operate the bus between Tilbury Town and Tilbury Riverside!

Why are GWR including random bus services in their timetable data?
I hazard a guess that routes like the Kinchbus Skylink from Derby to East Midlands Airport is used for connections to/from the Airport.
 
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OliverH68

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The Guildford-Woking-Heathrow RailAir coaches are published upstream in systems, SWR just copy the RA2 timetable so it shows up in journey planners.
 

Ian Hardy

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The Guildford-Woking-Heathrow RailAir coaches are published upstream in systems, SWR just copy the RA2 timetable so it shows up in journey planners.
The RA2 buses still appear on RTT at Woking though.

Clicking on one of the RA2 buses: https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:C33924/2023-12-30/detailed, RTT only shows the stops at stations and the Heathrow terminals, it does not show any other stops that service calls at, see First's timetable: https://www.railair.com/timetables/RA2
 
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On the homepage, RRT lists “popular departure boards”. These are all as one would expect (the London termini, Clapham Junction, Manchester Piccadilly etc.), expect the last, which is a prank. It cycles through a number of very lightly used stations (Sugar Loaf, Portsmouth Arms etc). Thought I’d point this out to those who haven’t noticed as I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned before.
 

jon0844

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On the homepage, RRT lists “popular departure boards”. These are all as one would expect (the London termini, Clapham Junction, Manchester Piccadilly etc.), expect the last, which is a prank. It cycles through a number of very lightly used stations (Sugar Loaf, Portsmouth Arms etc). Thought I’d point this out to those who haven’t noticed as I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned before.

That's pretty clever and funny!
 

david1212

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On the homepage, RRT lists “popular departure boards”. These are all as one would expect (the London termini, Clapham Junction, Manchester Piccadilly etc.), expect the last, which is a prank. It cycles through a number of very lightly used stations (Sugar Loaf, Portsmouth Arms etc). Thought I’d point this out to those who haven’t noticed as I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned before.

That's pretty clever and funny!

I had never looked.
Right now the last is Dolwyddelan.
 

Peter0124

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Another idea related to the above is to have a 'Station of the day' were everyday it picks a random station out of all 2,500+ and puts a link to the detailed version of it somewhere on the website.
 

duffield

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I had Reddish South just now, not too many departures from there...
Thornton Abbey (Barton-on-Humber branch). Missed the last train back to Grimsby by 2 minutes. :E

I'd really never have noticed this since I always go straight to the detailed search page.

I've actually been on that branch a few times recently despite not living locally.

I've now got a compulsion to keep on refreshing...
 

Trainguy34

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29 Apr 2023
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Kent
How many will it take me to get the trio (Berney Arms, Shippea Hill, Sugar Loaf)?

1) Roman Bridge
2) Springfield
3) Loch Eli Outward Bound
4) Shippea Hill
5) Tonfanau
6) Sugar Loaf
7) Broomfleet
8) Falls of Cruachan
9) Invershin
10) Hubberts Bridge
11) Shippea Hill
12) Wressle
13) Dolgarrog
14) Beasdale
15) Llangammarch

About 40 refreshes later... Still nothing, many in Wales and Anglia however and time for bed.
 

XCTurbostar

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Quick note that LEVEN station does not show in the 'Where? - Location' combo box on the main page. It should be open by June :)
 
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It's been extremely lacklustre in the number of KYT additions of late. Is the current list likely to be the complete and exhaustive list?
 

TT-ONR-NRN

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Farnham
Worth noting that some of the newer stations such as East Linton aren't currently offered in the drop down when you type in the station.
 

skyhigh

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Apparently this c2c service is to be operated by 357202 + 357327 + 720609 :!: Has someone converted the 720/6s to Tightlock overnight? :lol:
As has been mentioned tens of times in this thread, RTT simply displays the allocation data provided by the operator. It's probably a set swap where the replacement has been added but the original hasn't been removed by whoever input the swap at C2C for whatever reason.
 

ValleyLines142

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It's been extremely lacklustre in the number of KYT additions of late. Is the current list likely to be the complete and exhaustive list?
Remember that the owner of the website, and various others involved, I believe already work full time anyway. Decisions like this aren't taken lightly. Patience is a virtue ;)
 

ThePeakNed

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Remember that the owner of the website, and various others involved, I believe already work full time anyway. Decisions like this aren't taken lightly. Patience is a virtue ;)
That and some TOCs / Franchisees simply don't want to take part. Abellio for instance are very against it, hence why you don't get anything for the likes of WMR, LNWR and MerseyRail.
 

jon0844

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Lacklustre seems a bit harsh given that we don’t pay for it

It's a bit like people who moan at YouTubers because they didn't post a video on the day they usually do, or dared to take a holiday and didn't queue up a bunch of videos to go live in their absence.
 

MrJeeves

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Why would they be against it?
I don't know how it exactly works, but it might be that they don't benefit in any way from the data being public, so they see no reason to spend time organising access to it.

They might see the information as commercially sensitive, too, or maybe they don't want to make "promises" with lacklustre data quality, or all manner of things.

End of the day, it's their choice, and we should be grateful for the level of data we already get from RTT and TOCs.
 

Western 52

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Burry Port
Personally, I find Know Your Train very useful, especially to avoid short formed trains that may be overcrowded. It's also good for avoiding 150 and 153 substitutions! It's a shame some TOCs don't support it.
 

Benjwri

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Bath
Why would they be against it?
I think a fair few don't see it as worth their while, especially operators that don't have variety in their stock, so from their perspective there isn't much to be found out. It's also worth mentioning it ahs been stated here before part of the issue is bringing operators on is expensive, and RTT pays that cost, so they can't all be brought on at once. It can probably be inferred from this bringing a new system on is more expensive than bringing an operator with a very similar system to currently, for example Lumo will likely have been cheaper as it probably has similar systems to other FirstGroup TOCs.
 

Robski_

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9 Aug 2019
Messages
106
Why would they be against it?
Because it's not worth it? Some of the Abellio TOCs supply formation information through Darwin, which is all that the passenger needs and is meant to see.

It's worth pointing out that an industry system for opening up train allocations already exists. It's called Connecting Train Identifiers (CTI), and it went live in 2019. However, because operators raised unjustified concerns over security, it wasn't made public in a last minute u-turn. There are a number of people in the "open rail data" community who are not happy about this - myself included - especially given that most operators are now suddenly happy to hand this data over to RTT.

To summarise: why would TOCs introduce additional systems and infrastructure to complete a function which another system already does?
Helps them hide short formations (4 Vs 8 coaches on WCML services, 2 coach specials on Snow Hill lines etc)
WMT and Greater Anglia publish formations through Darwin. They aren't hiding anything.
 

Tom

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There are some strong assumptions in the last few posts that are completely off mark.

There are some operators that do not wish this information to be shared to the degree that we show in RTT. Most of the TOCs not included is due to certain senior staff being disinterested and preferring to do their own thing outside of any existing industry process. I specifically say 'most' - it is not all operators, and as I said above the current list is not the final one.

It's worth pointing out that an industry system for opening up train allocations already exists. It's called Connecting Train Identifiers (CTI), and it went live in 2019. However, because operators raised unjustified concerns over security, it wasn't made public in a last minute u-turn. There are a number of people in the "open rail data" community who are not happy about this - myself included - especially given that most operators are now suddenly happy to hand this data over to RTT.
I wasn't particularly impressed when that occurred either and from my understanding it wasn't particularly last minute either. I find it quite interesting that little use of that feed is being made in a public arena.

To pick up specifically why that data is being made available to us now, the data that we do have isn't perfect and it's nowhere near as good as what CTI should be. It is half of the puzzle. In an ideal world the underlying data should be open to everyone, and we've now knocked down the argument about security or whatever nonsense the industry wants to come up with. It's happening for various small reasons that have all compounded, and RTT does now have a significant amount of traffic coming to it (in the millions of users) which does benefit us. I have made pushes inside the industry to get this data released now we have it - but I've had to put that on a backburner on the last 6-12 months as I've had to concentrate on delivering R&D work for NR.
To summarise: why would TOCs introduce additional systems and infrastructure to complete a function which another system already does?
With the exception of three operators, no TOC has introduced any additional services or systems to distribute this data to us. We have done all the rest of the systems work at our end and we have a lot of different integrations we have to support now. We are also covering the entire cost of providing this service - so it's fairly win win for operators.
 

Robski_

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With the exception of three operators, no TOC has introduced any additional services or systems to distribute this data to us. We have done all the rest of the systems work at our end and we have a lot of different integrations we have to support now. We are also covering the entire cost of providing this service - so it's fairly win win for operators.
Fair enough, I stand corrected.
 

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