[Talk-GB] Virgin Train Traces (Richard Mann)

[John McKerrell]

On 29 Sep 2009, at 13:14, Phil James wrote:

> <richard.mann.westoxford at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>> A quick look at oepnvkarte indicates we have all of Virgin's  
>> operating
>> routes already. Maybe some of the traces aren't great, but I think  
>> some
>> tracing off NPE ought to fix that, surely?
>>
>> While positional info is probably in the trains (though I don't  
>> remember it
>> ever being discussed in the context of Pendolino or Voyager), the  
>> effort
>> required to extract it is probably several times greater than  
>> simply carting
>> your own GPS around.
>>
>> Richard 
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
> NPE tracing is not that accurate, certainly in Lancs/Yorks - the
> Morecambe - Skipton line is fairly approximate in several areas. The
> Yahoo imagery is so small as to be next to useless, especially now so
> many other ways are mapped.
> I interpreted John McKerrels email to be an attempt to save someone  
> the
> time (and expense?) of actually getting GPS traces themselves. I  
> wonder
> if other operators would be as helpful?

Richard, I believe all the Virgin trains have GPSes, they're also like  
faraday cages so you're lucky if you get a good fix from your own GPS  
device (sometimes I have, other times I haven't).

I've now emailed, no idea if they'll come back with anything, I think  
it's a case of this guy goes to the marketing department and they say  
"how much press could we get off this and how much effort would it  
take". As the amount of press is probably minimal I'm not going to get  
my hopes up but I thought I'd ask him anyway.

John