Indian Railways, live on Google Maps

That was a great read. Thank you!

59% of trains delayed is not an accurate representation. IR has what is known as an operating schedule provided for intermediate stations which differs from the published schedule. The intermediate and published schedules are synchronized at major junctions along the way. The operating schedule has slack built in. A train running late by upto an hour usually arrives on or before time at major and terminating stations. A case in point right at this instance 65% of the trains are on schedule, checking during the morning hours in India will show a higher on time percentage on time as trains approach terminating stops.

The delays made the trip awesome. I haven't gotten onto a train in a decade but tier-2 AC is the greatest travel experience in the world.

yeah, I also do miss them so much..

a 36 hour journey from Chennay to NJP in a Sleeper.. This is India.)

At least the food on the Indian AC trains is not that awful.

I am sure "being delayed" had a lot to do with the fond memories :-)

When I was a kid and used to go on vacation with family, the late train was so good for me. It meant few extra vacation hours before schools and homework would start. I hope it would become the same again. BTW, only my lifestyle has changed. Train timings are still there where they were 15 yrs ago or maybe have become "more relaxing" :-)

Indian Railways has numerous monitoring stations. (mainly at railway stations) These monitoring stations update train's location when trains pass 'em.

In between such points, IR may know train's realtime location, but it is not made public.

Update

It is mentioned on the site that there are 6000 monitoring stations. Which means that, on average, there is a monitoring station every 11 kms (66k Km/ 6000). Considering an average speed of 80kmph, the location shown on the app can at max be 8.25 minutes old.

Usually, all railway lines must know the position of every train at any time. This is simply a requirement for avoiding crashes. As far as I know, there are usually pressure/induction sensors at regular intervals that detect train positions. Maybe that is what they are using?

Electric railways usually only supply actually used sections of the railway with power, so they have to know train positions, too.

Indian railways employs a number of methods. The most primitive fallback is the one where the station master updates the system whenever a train passes the station, whether or not it stops there.

http://trainenquiry.com/ already has same information in text/html format. This is just mapped to gui. Personally I prefer html format.

trainenquiry.com is operated by CRIS (which falls under the railways ministry). So they have access to all of IR data.

10.2c(iii) is pretty clear that this use is explicitly allowed:

"you may use the Google Maps API(s) to track assets such as cars, buses or other vehicles, as long as your tracking application is made available to the public without charge. For example, you may offer a free, public Maps API Implementation that displays real-time public transit or other transportation status information.)"

"please contact the Google Maps API for Business sales team" I'm pretty sure they did exactly that and got a green light.

Use Leaflet or Modest Maps!

"world's largest public sector employer"

That dubious honour appears to belong to the US Dept. of Defense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers

AFAIK, this is done by railyatri.in for Indian Railways