opendata

A Class 800 test train set spotted at Paddington shortly before the launch of the Intercity 125 replacements in October 2017, operated by GWR and Virgin East Coast As a long time user of Realtimetrains.co.uk (which is where you should go for all your real time train tracking needs in the UK), and someone with an appreciation of Open Rail Data (having used it myself), I jumped at the chance of helping their development. They’ve put out an appeal to record GPS tracks of train services that you travel on with the link to the service on the application. A lot of the work behind the scenes performed by a small team involves maintaining data relating to train positioning and comparing this with the signalling system outputs we use. This is an entirely manual task involving one of us going out with a radio controlled watch and monitoring the passage of trains through stations and junctions. An area of recent interest for us has been attempting to compute this automatically using other known bits of information. In order to validate this effort, we either have to do the manual task with a watch or collect a large dataset of GPS traces to compare against our dataset. The more data we have will allow us to improve the end product. Which is awesome. I wanted to contribute. I found a suitable app for Android called GPSlogger which seemed to fit the bill. It has quite a few settings, so I thought I’d write a quick guide on what I’ve used to successfully generate a working track for a service. ...