Discussion summary
A real-time map of Great Britain's rail network uses open signaling data to track train locations, which some find intrusive. The system shows train positions on sections of track, but not precise locations within those sections. Users discuss its usefulness and privacy implications.
What the discussion says
- Some see it as essential for safety and operations.
- Others find the surveillance aspect disturbing.
- The data shows train locations on track sections, not exact points.
- There is interest in visual features like animation.
- Some users find the system effective for long-distance travel.
“Knowing the location of trains is pretty important.”
“This information is derived from open signalling data, which the signalling system has to track.”
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- Hacker News
- I looked into the gtfs (gtfs.org) a while ago. This is a data feed format (protobuf based) that a lot of sites like this use for both schedules and real time updates that is pretty widely adopted. Most gtfs location feeds require getting an API key. But there are a handful of public ones that share actual location updates without that.
This is also how e.g. Google maps and others integrate schedule information for public transport as well.
Building a map from the real time updates is relatively straight foward once you have access.
- GTFS is widely adopted, "standardized", but also quite a wild west when it comes to the actual details. I've been building http://mobility-bot.com/ as a spare time project for two years, parsing the alerts GTFS feeds from a handful of providers, and for just about every one of them, I have to do something in the pipeline to clean up the provided data - fixing unicode issues, remapping route and agency IDs, rewriting headers and descriptions to not be identical, etc. You also have to watch and capture the data over time to make sure you have a corpus to generalize parsing and cleanup rules from.
Most of these projects made the smart choice to focus on a single or just a small handful of related providers. As soon as you're trying to aggregate, the problem becomes a lot trickier.
by dan_sbl - Boston: https://tmap.live.
London: https://londonunderground.live
this reminds me of the London specific equivalent posted awhile back: https://londonunderground.live (previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43651390).
by niknight - Dutch (and Dutch-bound) rail network overview: https://treinposities.nl/ And the equivalent for buses: https://busposities.nl/ Not all of them have GPS trackers, so some positions are guessed.
There's functionality for this in the official Dutch Railways app, but it looks like they didn't bother putting that onto their website. There is a common source of open data for most of these details, but I don't find the docs to be very complete.
by jeroenhd - Wow! https://treinposities.nl/ even shows historical positions since 2019. Feels like something you'd only see in a cheesy murder mystery.
- Here is the map made by the Swedish transport authority: https://www.trafikverket.se/trafikinformation/tagkarta/by CivilR
- Cool app with some useful features.
Here is my custom map of UK trains that are affordable
https://www.map.signalbox.io/?location=@52.86376,-2.32537,4....
And here is my map of UK trains that aren't subsidised despite being 'private companies'
https://www.map.signalbox.io/?location=@52.86376,-2.32537,4....
And here is a map of trains that use the fact they are moving quickly through the air to provide some semblance of ventilation
https://www.map.signalbox.io/?location=@52.86376,-2.32537,4....
by jimnotgym - Hey wait a minute, there isn't any train on any of these maps!by ant6n
- This only seems to be standard overground trains. If you add in metro networks like the London tube, or light rail / trams like in Manchester, then you’d get at least hundreds more.by robin_reala
- The map includes metros across the Tyne and Wear Metro in NE England, and while its not perfect, it's by far the most useful train live tracking I've ever seen. There's quite a few places in the UK with different rail systems that don't fit together (and have apps of varying quality/usefulness)by jordand
- There's one for the Czech network (one of the densest in the world, if not the densest) https://grapp.spravazeleznic.czby drej
- And obligatory one for Slovakia with much better UX.
https://mapa.zsr.sk/index.aspx
And Polish one, still a gen or two behind just like their rail network. It needs to be said they are investing heavily to bring it up to scratch.
by butterknife - Would be better if it had some technical explanation rather than just yet another public transport map. This:
https://vgcgroup.co.uk/news/signalbox-for-train-locations/
suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way. I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are, or what the AI is trained on, or anything really vs just looking at a map.
- > I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are
It varies substantially across the network, dependent on the mode of operation of the signalling, the desired headway, the maximum operating speed, the service braking distance of the rolling stock at line speed, factors in the layout that might influence safety (e.g. junctions), the number of colour lights used on signal heads (i.e. 2, 3 or 4 colour lights), signal sighting distance, whether signal visibility might be affected by sun glare, etc. And of course this assumes that the area is actually using line-side signals – most of the network does, but there's notable exceptions using in-cab signalling or computer-based train control.
> suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way
I'm in no way affiliated with the website, but in areas that follow track circuit block principles (much of the heavily-used main GB railway network, excluding many more lightly-used outlying lines), the "signalling information" that article indicates the site derives from is almost certainly Network Rail's Train Describer (TD) feed. This feed reports the headcodes for signalling berths across the layout. The signalling system will normally step headcodes automatically as the train activates successive track circuits or operates axle counters in the track.
The Train Describer can only report headcodes in berths, and berths might be quite long! It certainly doesn't provide second-by-second train progress, so this site's mapping engine is likely doing some proprietary interpolation to make the train position indicators appear to "move" in real time to give the illusion of trains making progress. (Whatever the inputs to their algorithm/model are, their calling it "AI" loses all technical specificity.) This interpolation may be based on line speed, perhaps the observed average time a headcode normally remains in a given berth, allowing them to derive a typical 'average speed' for that berth or section.
If it was me designing this, I'd expect a mixture of the train class, the rolling stock and line speed to give a good estimator of the train's current position in block. You then have to make a product decision to decide what to do if you miscalculated train position – do you make staccato jumps of the train position indicators on the map if you got it wrong, or do you somehow try to smooth your error out over another period to avoid indicators suddenly moving?
In other areas of the country, train position may be reported by GPS on equipped units, or in some areas, the passage of trains is dependent on manual reports by the signaller, so the map may not have much real-time data to infer train position from. I find it highly unlikely that they're deriving much accurate data in real time from smartphone apps, but it could be a (noisy, incomplete) set of inputs to improve their model of how trains typically make progress through particular berths.
- I've tried building one of these and the answer is - it's difficult.
There is a message queue that you can use to identify the last reported location of a train. Depending on the line you could get a pretty accurate real-time map (but first you need to georeference all of the location identifiers to eastings/northings.)
But many lines report only the last movement at a station stop - these are mostly in rural areas so the best approach seems to be to build some sort of dead-reckoning network taking into account train type and network utilisation.
by 4ndrewl - Meanwhile, the sad state of intercity trains in the United States, outside of the Northeast Corridor.by dan_sbl
- Checkout the French equivalent : https://carto.tchoo.net. Looks more complete.
Past similar HN submission got no attention, whereas the UK's top page. Interesting !
by maelito - That's no surprise. The French equivalent of anything rail related is always more complete than the UK.by windowliker
- And to see the status (Ile-de-France only): https://ratpstatus.fr/trains.htmlby dominicrose
- Is the interesting part the upvotes, meaning there's more people interested in UK train networks than French ones ? And it's a comment on demographics ?
Or is the interesting part that the UK one is real-time, and the French one isn't (or at least, zooming in, I don't see them moving).
by spacedcowboy - The title matters a lot. Without "real-time" this submission has likely gotten the same lack of attention.by KlutzySofa
- Note that carto.tchoo does not provide real position in real-time: it only has access to departures, stops, delays and suppressions and interpolate position based on this.
This means that if your train is running at half-speed or stopped but does not result in an official delay, the position will not match reality.
by Shywim - > Signalbox's technology identifies the train a device is on by matching a snapshot of smartphone data to a train’s trajectory data. The technology uses advanced algorithms works even with severely degraded data. We are able to pinpoint a smartphone to any type of train without background location tracking or hardware.
Hmm, that's...interesting?
by AJRF - It works fairly well empirically: my 7yo likes to watch trains and we regularly use this map to know when to expect one to pass. Not perfect, but pretty goodby RobinL
- I wonder what app has allow location on all the time and is feeding them their data
- Seems similar to Transit's approach: https://blog.transitapp.com/go-underground/
- Switzerland's real-time map of trains and public transport (zoom in on a city to view its public transport in real time). You can find boats too.
And if you check on/off the other options, you get way more informations.
https://maps.trafimage.ch/ch.sbb.netzkarte?lang=en&baselayer...
by Bengalilol - I think I saw and was fascinated by this which some time back here on Hackernews, https://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/by Brajeshwar
- It's certainly a cool map and useful to get a general idea how many trains are around at any given time, but it's important to note that this is not real data. They use the train schedule combined with the projected delay to estimate track location. I'm not sure if it's because SBB has an interest in keeping reported delays low or if they think exposing real data is a security risk, but I noticed the data being fake on several occasions, for example:
- My train wasn't able to continue its journey and was stuck between two stations for a few minutes while the map showed it continue to the next few stations up until the point where it started moving again, when their App also showed it running with a delay of 8min.
- On several occasions: watching the map show a train roll into the station and driving off, while seeing from my window that the train is only just arriving when the map shows it as between stations already.