Anyone who travels along the North Cotswold Line regularly will know that the information screens can sometimes be rather confusing, with trains showing delayed or on-time and then disappearing from the screens long before they arrive. That was often due to the lack of reports made keeping track of exactly where it was. Manual reports from signallers en-route meant that they were only entered at a few locations, sometimes there was a delay reporting them, they weren't reported at all, or wrongly.
Now, GPS based reporting has been enabled which should improve things considerably, as reports should now be made at every station and junction en-route. This also feeds into the various public systems like realtimetrains, nationalrail, and opentraintimes.
Here's a couple of examples from opentraintimes, who handily mark GPS reports with a black arrow.
https://www.opentraintimes.com/schedule/P66980/2021-01-22https://www.opentraintimes.com/schedule/P67909/2021-01-22It won't be perfect. Anything delayed waiting access onto the single line sections still won't get reported as late until on the move, and if the GPS system on the train is faulty there will be no reports. But it should improve things in all other cases.
It's not just the North Cotswold Line, as other places that have relied on manual reports, such as Cornwall and Castle Cary to Dorchester are now also getting GPS reports:
https://www.opentraintimes.com/schedule/W30150/2021-01-22https://www.opentraintimes.com/schedule/P69436/2021-01-22
