[Talk-GB] Mapping train services in Great Britain

[Tony Shield]

Hi Michael

As you say train services in England,Wales and Scotland (EWS) are 
difficult to map, Northern Ireland has its own train system.

'Routes' have different meanings depending on the view point of the user 
of the word. To a passenger there is a route Southampton to Brighton 
which is direct, there is also a route where you have to change trains 
and travels on a different railway line.

To the infrastructure operator a route is a geographic region with many 
lines and services that may use a particular piece of railway 
infrastructure. So London to Brighton is a route that may also 
incorporate the branches to Littlehampton and Newhaven.

Mapping the railway infrastructure has mostly been completed, but the 
services are complex, the route Preston to Manchester has trains which 
start in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Barrow-in-Furness, Blackpool North and 
Preston, and terminations in Manchester Piccadilly, Manchester Oxford 
Road, Manchester Victoria, Stockport, Heald Green and Manchester 
Airport.  Relating that set of variations and then been able to ask 
meaningful queries is I think beyond OSM. It is why there are many 
specialised ticket and route planning apps available.

I notice that someone has created a relation for the  10:28 service from 
Southampton Central to Brighton - but is the creator likely to maintain 
it for the years, it is of no real use unless all the other trains are 
so mapped.

Each service has its own internal reference/ID eg 1A26 which is not 
publicly available and may change with each timetable change.

My experience is that the professionals in the rail industry mess up the 
timetables with sufficient regularity that OSM maintaining its own 
version is going to be difficult.

You ask about joining and separating serves - passengers are not told if 
a service splits, they are advised to travel in first 4 coaches or the 
rear 8 coaches  - or similar. Inside the industry a service that joins 
may start as 1A88 and join with 1A56 at Preston to go forward as 1A88.

I'll happily help if I can but mapping the EWS rail system is hard - 
even for the professionals.

Tony

TonyS999

On 30/05/2021 21:52, Michael Tsang wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I'm attempting to map some of the train services in Great Britain. However,
> the rail network in GB is so hard to use and so hard to understand that I need
> to ask the correct way to map it.
>
> For example, the route I'm working on is Southampton - Brighton, however, it
> seems that trains between these two termini have different stops for every
> departures. In this case, do I create a relation showing the stops served for
> each departure?
>
> Also, there are some cases where a train split or merge en-route. How do I map
> these services?
>
> Thanks,
> Michael
>
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