About

Recent Train Times came from a desire to have better information when planning rail travel. Especially when there is a need to be somewhere by a specific time and/or when changing trains.

On some lines, trains perform well almost all of the time. On other lines, particularly longer distance and commuter routes, performance is more variable.

Recent Train Times provides information about how specific trains (e.g. the 07:59 from X to Y) have been running in recent weeks.

Hopefully, this should allow smarter decisions that mean, on average, we are able to arrive on time more often.

Technical Information

The information shown on Recent Train Times is sourced from Network Rail via their Open Data Feeds (which sources data from the Network Rail TRUST system), augmented with additional data sourced from the Rail Delivery Group via their Darwin system.

These data feeds provide real time information about train movements across the rail network. The two data sources serve different purposes - TRUST / the Network Rail Open Data Feeds are a record of actual train running vs. schedule. TRUST receives most train running data in real-time but some data can be input hours or days later. The Open Data Feeds also have a few gaps, e.g. skipped station stops are not accurately described. To fill these gaps, Recent Train Times uses the Darwin Data Feed. Darwin focusses on providing real-time information to passengers and for example does include skipped station stops.

The overall data processing solution is hosted primarily on the Azure Cloud Platform.

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