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Great stuff! The race to build a map of the UK with trains moving around on it begins in 11 days.

I hope that we'll see an app for the UK with CityMapper levels of awesomeness soon, that would be rad. The National Rail apps built by the various train operators are missing some good stuff.

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TrainTimes already has a map (http://traintimes.org.uk/map/#bhm) although I'm not sure of their data source.

I've looked at this before and it's already doable through the network rail api (https://datafeeds.networkrail.co.uk/), which differs from the national rail enquiries api and as far as I can remember (and can see) is free.

Playing around with it, there is room for improvement in the accuracy. Quite a few routes and stations are missing.

Yeah definitely, Edinburgh has acquired a few extra rail bridges! IIRC the network rail movement feed tells you when a train has reaching specific passing points, so there is a very granular level of data available if you want to show movements on the track.

OpenTrainTimes already has something like this: it's a signalling diagram rather than a map (railways work in blocks of track rather than absolute train position) and @poggs uses data from the signalling system to show what block a service is in.

See http://www.opentraintimes.com/maps

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