In message
s.com of Sat, 19 Jun 2010 13:32:46 in uk.transport.london,
" writes
On 19 June, 21:15, Paul Corfield wrote:
On Sat, 19 Jun 2010 19:40:16 +0100, "Chris Read"
wrote:
Moving east, is anything currently scheduled to reverse at Newbury Park or
Debden?
Newbury Park - definitely.
Debden - not sure.
I am fairly sure I've seen it at the end of the weekday morning peak.
On 2 Journey Planner sessions, I grabbed trains from Loughton to Debden
and Epping in next Monday's morning peak. I infer that those in the
former list and not in the latter terminate at Debden.
i.e. the 07:27, 07:52, 08:25, 08:44, and 08:53 from Loughton.
I leave their start stations and times as an exercise for the reader.
The Journey Planner (JP) is quite a useful tool. While I did the
comparison manually, I have a complete ability to drive JP from VBA
(Visual Basic for Applications) using the DOM (Document Object Model)
from IE8. (Access to a DOM for Firefox is harder and one working method
is enough for me.) When I made an FOI request for the interface, I was
told I could not have the information as it is commercially
confidential. I did not push the point as I have a practical
understanding of it.
Would be good if the LU WTTs were accessible on the net. (At least I'm
assuming that they are not). Why are rail operators so precious about
ensuring WTT contents are "Private and not for publication"? Surely Mr
Al Ki Ada isn't likely to be eagerly pouring over them with malign
intent in his wi-fi cave? Would a "Freedom of Information Request" be
worth trying?
It has been done before. The problem is that TfL reckons they don't
exist in a machine-readable form. They will produce them on paper when
requested. My suspicion is that while they are not held in a standard
format like Excel or Access, it ought to be possible to get them in an
internal machine-readable format with the documentation of that format
and, with that, write a filter to a comma-separated variable file and
import that into Excel. http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/ is a good place
for information on previous FOI requests.
Nobody has mentioned Thursday's "Metro", which featured Developer Data.
At http://www.tfl.gov.uk/, click "Business & Partners" to arrive at
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/default.aspx.
There click Developers' area to arrive at
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/businessandpartners/syndication/default.aspx
Click "View our example feeds" to arrive at
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/b
usinessandpartners/syndication/example-feeds.aspx
Click "Tube departure boards, line status and station status" and "View
feed" to get to http://data.london.gov.uk/apibeta
http://apibeta.london.gov.uk/Tracker...ableService.as
px?Feed=4&Line=N&StationCode=MGT&Times=30 currently shows:
- ROOT
Time TimeStamp="2010/06/19 22:10:58" /
- S Code="MGT" N="Moorgate."
- P N="Northbound - Platform 7" Code="0"
T S="101" T="15" D="225" C="2:30" L="At Bank Platform 4" DE="High Barnet via Bank" /
T S="102" T="16" D="0" C="10:00" L="At Kennington Platform 3" DE="Unknown" /
T S="103" T="16" D="0" C="13:00" L="Kennington Depot" DE="Unknown" /
/P
....
I threw together a file of station and line combinations. It rendered
easily with IE8 and Firefox 3.5.? on my PC. Sadly, it did not render on
Internet Explorer or Opera on my Windows Mobile PDA. I shall look
further. It would be nice to have a minimal data snapshot of the next 30
minutes on a line at a particular station. I suppose I'm going to have
to acquire a minimal knowledge of running XML on a PDA. It would also be
nice to cover lines looking for undeclared Minor Delays, etc. My strong
suspicion is that LU line controllers are loath to declare such
incidents - particularly on the Circle Line where a 15 minute headway
should be classed as Minor Delays and 20 minutes as Severe Delays when
compared with timetabled 10 minute headways.
--
gordon
--
Walter Briscoe