How Trainiac’s data comes to be
Also: data, pipeline, where does the data come from
The railway reports every train as it runs. Trainiac listens, keeps every word, and turns it into your journeys.
Example
The railway reports
Timetable, TRUST, Train Describer and Darwin messages, all day long
Trainiac records
Every message saved word for word, kept forever
Every train, pieced together
Planned, expected and actual times for each run
Your journey
Your train, frozen into your account when you log it
Britain’s railway is constantly talking about itself. Network Rail publishes the timetable every day, and sends out a message whenever a train passes a timing point (TRUST) or moves between two signals (the Train Describer). National Rail’s Darwin sends out its predictions of when trains will arrive.
Trainiac’s servers stay connected to these feeds day and night. Every single message is saved exactly as it arrived and never thrown away, so if we ever read something wrong, we can go back and read it again.
From those messages Trainiac builds a picture of every train run, from 60 days ago to tomorrow: where it was meant to stop, when it was expected, and when it really got there.
When you log a journey, Trainiac finds your train in that picture and copies everything about it into your account, so your journey stays complete even after the railway’s data moves on.
In Trainiac
Everything you see about a train, from its stops to its delay, comes through these steps.