Great Western Coffee Shop

Standing, freezing, on the footbridge at Chippenham at lunchtime today ... counting passengers into the station as part of a survey.  OK - I admit it - I got bored just standing and got my laptop out ... the experimental work I was doing yesterday for onward trains has been expanded a bit and you'll find a departure board for around 20 key stations on the top of each page on the forum.


It's using public, dynamic information but I've tuned it to let you select a destination station, and I've also added in the expected arrival time there so that (for example) passengers from Bristol Temple Meads to Taunton can see whether to catch the local train or wait for a Cross Country service.  A few gaps in times / data combing just yet - but it is giving forecast and day to day times not just timetables so it should be as good as the station screens even at times of disruption.

Personally, I expect I'll use "next train to Bath" quite a bit rather than be going down lists looking at Paddington (not all of which will call at Bath, expecally in the future), Westbury, Fromes, Warminsters Wesymouths and Portsmouths!  Just tell me the next train to Bath!

Isn't it dangerous to allow boars on trains?
 ;D

Think the fingers may have frozen up.

Times have changed ... it used to be pretty standard to transport livestock by train, but you try and take your pony these days ...

Fingers foured out now ... titles corrected

In passenger coaches, yes potentially dangerous. Should be safe as freight in suitable wagons.

Incidentally if you type

gwr.to/[3 letter station code]

in to any browser, you will get the staff departure board for that station.  It only works for GWR stations though.

Very good addition  :) - any chance Newbury could be added? (accepting that Thatcham is not a key Station, although Newbury might be  ;) )

That's amazing - to think that gwr that provides this service to its people. 

A couple of questions though.

1. Are GWR thinking of starting services in Tonga* - according to Wikipedia there are no operations railways or trams there so it would be a big investment. :)
2. Also why would the people of Tonga need information on GWR's services in the UK?  :)

* .to is the domain name for Tonga

Although it appears that you can't use capitals so 'did' instead of 'DID'.

I've added it to the pulldown menu list on all the other stations - and it's also under http://www.mrug.org.uk/nby.html .. we could end up with a  very long and cluttered list at the top of the Coffee Shop page.  There are others I wondered about adding too ... I may move to a pulldown menu, and I'm wondering about geolocation too.

...so not much use to most members of the travelling public then (unlike Grahame's attempts here, I might add)!

This gwr.to site looks useful. Mind you, I just typed clc into it, and the narrative said that the first train is currently between Pewsey and Bruton. Now I know why the information on the station is sometimes a bit vague. . .

Of course a gwr.to request stays in Tonga for barely a millisecond before coming back expanded into "http://iris2.rail.co.uk/tiger/renderstaffsoad.asp?file=" and a specific XML file number. I note that the underlying Tiger service (http://iris2.rail.co.uk/tiger/) has acquired a few more customers - on the basis of a quick look at the names, it seems that stations managed by Overground, NIR, LNER, NIR, WMR, and at least the Thameslink bit of GTR are available. (However, I'm not convinced listing is governed 100% by which TOC operates the station.)

The Station comparator has links to live departure boards for all stations, not just GWR.

It's to distract the competition. What GWR are actually after in the South Pacific is narrow gauge sugar wagons in Fiji – they have great potential as conversions for UK commuter services.  ;D

The difference I've tried to make is not just to list all the upcoming departures, but also let people put in their destination and have it filter out direct trains to there.  Some stations such as Salisbury do have a big "next fastest train to ..." board, but it's far from universal and not always visible when you're changing trains.

A further tuning update this morning ... I noted a "special notice" on Newbury when I added that to the list of supported stations, and I am now capturing and reporting such special notices:

(http://www.wellho.net/pix/nby_pew_20190130.jpg)

Good stuff Grahame.  I like the number of coaches bit.

Great stuff Grahame, it was just your comment (in your original reply to me re. Newbury)...


that had me a bit confused....I can't see that, I just see the list (in the site header) of the specific stations you've chosen under "Next departures"?

If I've misunderstood, I'm happy just to bookmark http://www.mrug.org.uk/nby.html, thanks.

I had a ride on one of those in St Kitts a few years back, and thoroughly recommend it next time you're there. The complimentary rum punch was good too, making people more beautiful as the ride progressed.


Nice work grahame! Now why had no-one thought of that before?

Probably because no-one had ever been as stupid as I was yesterday to spend two hours feeding my n**s off at Chippenham, watching what a high proportion of people try to get out of the barriers on their outward journey with the return half of their tickets  ;D ;D

I have added a few more stations ... Newton Abbot, Plymouth, Newport (South Wales), Frome, Worcester Shrub Hill, Swansea and Hereford - in each case stations where "what is the next train to xxxxxx" may not be obvious for all destinations.  Each has a shortform URL like http://www.mrug.org.uk/ply.html and each can also be found by using one of the other stations at the top of these pages and then using the pulldown menu on the page you're given.  I may look to add a direct pulldown on the top of this page for all stations implemented.

Please let me know of any glaring omissions, noting that data may be limited for none-GWR operated stations. 

I hope uou mean *freezing*.....!!!

Slick and useful piece of programming.  Well done Grahame.   Seemingly the number of coaches on departures from CDF is a secret.

'Feeding' for 'Freezing'. One of the best typos ever from graham's phroson phingers.
The guard would have had his X certificate red flag signed by the British Board of Film censors, out for sure ! ::) ;D

Yeah. Impressive access to travel information in one page, and its all on the Melksham Users site!

Came across this on the Somerset Travel site. Slick on the station and you get details of the trains and station

https://www.travelsomerset.co.uk/rail/

The drop down list for Reading doesn't show Pangbourne (nor Tilehurst, Goring & S or Cholsey): these stations do however show on Didcot Parkway.

I've just taken a look - got the same result.

The next departure for Pangbourne  and the other places as I write (15:27) isn't until 16:14 and that's not come up on the departure board yet - not one of the next 20 (or whatever it is) departures that are shown.   And the pulldown is dynamic - generated from the list of calling places of the next departures.

Not quite so many trains  ;D call at Didcot, so there's always going to be an hour plus of data there ...

Yes but would it be more appropriate to use/display the train head code rather than the train_uid, two platform staff at say Taunton would more likely use and understand what '2C77 will follow the late running Cross Country into platform 2 which is going to terminate at Exeter skipping the Tiv Parkway stop' rather than 'C55614 will follow the late running C50182 .... etc'.

Interesting data source behind that - https://developer.transportapi.com  . With the explosion of open source data ...