Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

- 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

https://portalpasazera.pl/MapaPociagow

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.

PS. If you are taking a feature request, I immediately double-clicked on my line to try to focus only on that (i.e. hide all the other lines). So that might be useful for others.

You can also buy tickets from either operator, but you have to buy tickets from the operator in the country that you're leaving (even if they're return tickets). This leads to the interesting situation where a Dublin->Belfast->Dublin return journey a couple of weeks out costs 28EUR, but a Belfast->Dublin->Belfast return journey on the same day costs 30GBP (~35EUR).

And if you're over 65 and live in Northern Ireland, you can use it for free, but you have to be over 66 to use it for free if you live in the Republic of Ireland.

Currently it's just the one cross-border link, but the 2050 rail plan calls for two more, so they'll presumably at some point have to make all this less weird.

There are many different alphabet-soup coding systems used across Network Rail, retailing systems, and the wider railway industry to identify locations on the network. Station names will often be different in different databases; look at any station with an apostrophe in and you'll find it inconsistently named in different places.

- So for some stations (most?) it shows that all trains go to the selected station, nowhere else.

- Also the search show only one station at a time instead of the multiple that could match the search. And even if we typed the whole station name, it might match another station, which mean the station is not selectable at all.

This is fairly typical for commuter trains in general, really; a last train time of midnight to 1 am, resuming around 5am, is common. 24 hour commuter trains are relatively rare, as the volume isn't there and they tend to do track maintenance at night.

is there any feedback??

Basically all of Europe, with varying levels of detail.

This could be said for the rail network as a whole.

Neglect and underinvestment over the last 60+ years has left it in a sorry state, and debacles such as HS2 show how government has no ability to deliver proper material upgrades to the ageing infrastructure and service. The direction of travel (scuse the pun) has been clear since the Beeching cuts: roads are the priority. Add to that Neoliberal divestment policies and we end up where we are today: overcrowded, filthy, ugly trains barely fit for cattle transport and chronically understaffed stations and train crews. Not to mention the extortionate prices for a ticket to travel on the network.

I adore rail travel, but dread the necessity of using it any time I go on a journey.

Possibly useful as a funky station arrival board, but overlaying that data on an actual map is a bit misleading.

TRUST (reporting system that describes train movements as they've happened) does accept updates by means other than the Train Describer, which might include GPS if the unit is equipped, and in many areas is dependent on signallers making manual reports (which may not be made immediately). They might also use TRUST as a data source, especially in non-Track Circuit Block areas. The rate of GPS updates is not going to be anywhere near as frequent as those train position indicators that appear to move here in "real time" across the map, so however they combine data sources, their site is trying to be clever in guessing train location.

It goes without saying: this sort of map is highly likely to be wildly inaccurate and isn't useful for anything safety-critical.

It's a bit massaged in some cases e.g. Transpennine, who have only recently been forced to stop abusing P-coding to pre-cancel trains that would have been significantly delayed. So I think those figures may take a dip.

But re: civilised countries: Germany's rail service is effectively significantly less punctual than ours; regional services are OK, about as good as ours, but if you need a longer haul service for any part of your journey you will have a very much worse experience. France is a bit more punctual on long-haul, I think; they average better within-the-minute punctuality on TGV, but regionally it is not better than the UK, it is worse. Italy (in some senses the most civilised country on earth) has poor train reliability.

Delays on UK networks are in many case due to very fundamental, long term issues that are hard to resolve. Rural lines that are single-track for geographic reasons, for example — where it's a choice of either single track or no train. And there are some absolutely pathological problems like the Borough Market Junction, which has been a cause of severe structural delays for about 140 years, in part because the only way to solve it is to destroy historic parts of London.

I personally do not think delays are the biggest problem in UK rail; ticket prices are. The slow return of train services to various forms of public ownership may help there, but we need the ROSCOs too. We need to stop what privatisation did. Perhaps we will.

Even if there were no such thing as GPS, simply the act of running a fleet of trains or trucks or buses on a schedule, means that anyone could do a bit of math and roughly calculate the position of every vehicle based solely on the schedule.

The reality is the illusion of pinpoint accuracy is a figment of this site's imagination; this site is using some creative license to guess the precise location of trains.