The 10:30 London overground service
to Enfield Town.
Calling at Bethnal Green, Cambridge Heath, London Field.
(upbeat music)
This is the train to Enfield Town.
Good morning.
I'm on the Overground,
London Overground and of Liverpool Street
where they've just started running the new class 710s.
This is the train to Enfield town.
And I'm going to the next stop which is Cambridge Heath.
If you are ever on a train-
Next station, Cambridge Heath.
I often use this website, Open Train Times,
to accurately track and see where your train is
in real time.
Is it is running at all?
Is it on time?
Is it running late?
By how many minutes is it running late?
What route is it taking?
Where is it going?
This comprehensive website with maps,
which we'll get to,
breaks down exactly all rail journeys
across the whole of the UK.
And for weeks, actually, maybe months,
actually over a year,
I've been chatting to Peter online,
the man who makes this website,
and I keep saying we must meet up,
say hello to each other,
and just do an interview about how you make and work,
and run this website and make it work
and he lives at Cambridge Heath
so I'm gonna go and chat to him.
(upbeat music)
It's nothing fancy,
it's just a sit down interview type of video.
Slightly raining by the way,
but it'd be great to meet Peter
just gonna go hang out at his flat,
geek out a bit,
see how Open Train Times works
and ask him some questions.
And the first question I asked him was.
(gentle music)
Well OpenTrainTimes started officially about 2011
when I registered the domain name and set up the website
whilst I was still working for a large media company
in Southwest London.
But the idea came from a project I was doing a few years ago
or a few years prior to that,
where I was working with timetable data for Network Rail.
And I thought, "Hey, I want to do something good with this."
It was about at the time when open data became a thing.
So I thought, well,
Hey, I want to show that if I can work with the data,
other people can work with the data,
and encourage the industry to get more of its data open.
And it sort of starts on those foundations.
Here's technology, here's a railway,
just meld it into one.
'Cause I was missing commuting on trains
after I moved into London.
I used to spend about an hour and a half travelling each way
to and from London.
I moved into London and thought,
oh no, I'll forget all about National Rail.
Was that thunder?
Please don't be thunder. It's gotta be thunder.
(gentle music)
So there are two sets of information.
There's schedule information
which comes from Network Rail's train planning system.
When I first started the project
that wasn't open data in the open sense,
but it wasn't confidential data.
So there was a bit of like,
is this okay for me to use?
And the sort of summary was, yes probably.
That's now published on the Network Rail open data platform
which I had quite a hand in getting running
and becoming a thing.
So it takes scheduled data from there
in a rather antiquated punch card based format
and then there's realtime data
from Network Rail's various systems such as TRUST,
the Train Describer System,
and the very short term planning system.
TRUST is a system that British Rail developed in the 1980s
to provide better information on train performance
than its predecessor called TOPS.
There was a time when tops ran the railway.
It controlled schedules
for passenger services and freight services.
But as more people needed to use it,
as technology became better,
British Rail developed a friendly user interface
to the mainframe and TRUST became a thing.
And now TRUST records train movements,
records planned train movements
and it records the actual movements that took place.
(gentle music)
It'll never be a hundred percent reliable.
Things can change.
The way I describe it is that TRUST is historically accurate
because it records what has just happened.
The industry knows very well
the circumstances in which it can't be accurate
and they work with that level of inaccuracy.
Rather than trying to make it too precise
and people doubt the accuracy of it,
It's deliberately accurate
only to about a minute either way,
and when you're working with the data from it, you know,
right well it could be a minute out either way
so that's a level of,
I wouldn't call it fudge,
but sort of known inaccuracy is taken into account
when you are you're working with it.
(gentle music)
Yeah, absolutely.
I had an email from somebody
at the former London Midland Franchise
who pointed out that he'd shown a customer
who was doubting the accuracy of the information
on their departure boards and said,
"Right, okay let me show you this."
Brought out his iPad,
got the website up and explained to the passenger
how a failed train here
meant that the train couldn't get through
and the customer was delighted and understood it.
(gentle music)
So it was probably sometime in 2010
when I had access to the Network Rail feeds
before they were open data.
This was in the process of trying to say,
yes a mere mortal can use this data
so you should make it available
which was wildly successful.
I came up with the idea of showing train positions on a map
because it's more visually entertaining
than just here's the departure board.
So I'd started a few basic things
but I didn't know enough about the signalling system
and how it all worked back then
so it was fairly primitive.
But I started with the London Overground
as it is now route from Watford to Houston.
And if I look back on that now,
it's hilariously simple
but my knowledge has grown over time,
I developed it in-house style for the maps.
They're all drawn by hand, 100% by hand
from various sources.
Sometimes train operators have asked
if I can do a map of their route
and given me route learning information for drivers.
Sometimes I've used Network Rail's
train planning system model
which is available in the open data site.
I've used a number of sources for doing it.
Yes, there are other sites out there
who may have coverage of the whole country,
but I've found automating producing the map
doesn't give you as visually pleasing looking a map
as if you actually spend the time to do it yourself.
(gentle music)
Officially it is the train reporting number.
Okay.
When it is populated on a train describer
it's called a description
and the description can be anything,
it doesn't have to be a train.
It is like a post-it note that the signaler can put in
and as the train moves
that post-it note will travel through it.
For example, at Cambridge Heath
we've got a train 2U49 is at platform one at the moment
and we've got train 2D40,
it's probably just passing the platform now,
I can't tell whether it stops there,
but I can click on it and it will bring up another page
that says, yep, 2D40 14:45 Liverpool Street Cheshunt,
it arrived 14:49, 1 minute early.
So if we go back to map
that train will then move off in due course
away to London Fields.
We can look further up the line.
We can see there's a route set for the train
from London Fields to Hackney Downs,
and at Hackney Downs there's a road signal
so the train, there's the signal sets of route
either to Clapton or Rectory road,
the train will stop there.
The white means I've automatically been able to link
that train to a schedule.
So a train in white I can click
and it will come up with a train schedule.
A train in yellow, such as,
let me find around 2O35 just passed Clapton on the map,
means one that I haven't been able to automatically link
to a schedule.
So it appears in yellow to say,
it's a train we're not a hundred percent sure what it is.
That mechanism I wrote probably five or six years ago,
it needs a bit of TLC.
I've got plans in the pipeline to make it a lot better
but you know,
there are only certain number of hours in a day,
it's taken me a while to get round to fixing it.
(gentle music)
Up until probably about four months ago,
it was just a part time hobby,
albeit a hobby that took up a lot of my time.
But when you're doing something that's fun
you don't really notice it.
It's sort of taking up your evenings and weekends.
But I quit my job about four months ago
and now I don't run the web,
well the website is run free to use,
they'll never be charged for it
but I have people who want me to do analysis work
off some of the data the website uses,
and I also work for various companies
doing technology consulting.
(gentle music)
But I use the site when I'm driving places.
Right, is that weird?
You're out and about and then you use your own website
to see what's going on with your journey.
It's not quite as weird as a time
when I was going from Kings Cross up to Leeds
and I was about to go into the lounge at Kings Cross
'cause I had about an hour before my train
and the person at the lounge
actually had my website up on their iPad
and I didn't make it into the lounge
because we spent 30 minutes talking about the website,
which is you know.
Did you literally walk up and go,
"Hello, I'm the man to behind this website."
I showed my ticket and then I looked down and said,
"That's my website."
It's like, "You did it?"
I was like, "Yeah."
"Wow, it's amazing, I love this,
"can you do this?"
And we talked about Kings Cross and the limitations
of showing the layout at Kings Cross et cetera.
And it was a very entertaining 20, 30 minutes.
Still caught my train,
but didn't get to sit in the lounge so.
(gentle music)
So the website is at www.opentraintimes.com.
Yeah and Twitter at opentraintimes.
That's it? Yay.
Oh small dog.
Okay, heading back to the station.
Peter's here, he's brought,
it's a tiny little dog. It's Electro.
Is it?
It's the best dachshund greyhound in the world.
Dogs are the best right? Dogs are the best.
Dogs are the best. And cats.
In case the cats are watching.
And it's that afternoon where it's that week
where it's been ridiculously hot
and we're waiting for the rain to fall
and you can feel like in the sky
the thunder's gonna come any second.
Are you and the dog gonna wave us off on the train then?
Yeah. Heading for the overground.
(upbeat music)
Platform one, I'm gonna get the 15:34.
I'm gonna check where that is on the app.
(upbeat music)
So the Dot Matrix at the station
is saying it's one minute late
and that concurs with what OpenTrainTimes are saying.
Well done. Thank you.
Well done, your website works, well done.
Thank you.
I shall be using this in future.
(upbeat music)
Is there anything else we haven't mentioned
about your amazing website,
and you gotta keeping your social distance.
Do dogs have to wear masks on to wear masks on trains?
The dogs don't have to wear face coverings do they?
Dogs will lick you. Dogs will lick you.
It's not so much a face covering
but a dog licking protector.
Electro wave to the camera.
(train engine purring)
Thank you so much. Pleasure.
Everybody use Peter's website.
He's got a dog so everything's good,
the world is good.
(door beeping)
This is the train to Liverpool Street.
Next station Bethnal Green.
So that is Peter, thank you, sir.
The man behind OpenTrainTimes that is onscreen now.
Bookmark it, save it on your phone
for next time you're out travelling
and you want check exactly precisely where your train is.
You can also follow him on Twitter.
Thanks very much.
(upbeat music)