Systeme D

19 February 2007

Attention all open railway data haxx0rs

is my 2007 entry for "Blog headline least likely to elicit interest from widest possible number of readers".

The Association of Train Operating Companies have made freely available, on their travel agents' website, the National Fares Manual. (Direct link - warning, 15Mb .zip.) Whether by accident or design is not yet clear.

Now I know this is really very unexciting but, well, this is kind of the Holy Grail for open railway data haxx0rs, of whom there must be at least two. (Hmmm... Clive Feather?) The NFM is theoretically the source material for working out all those whizzy things like London-to-Cambridge-for-£1.30 or Charlbury-to-Birmingham-for-half-price-if-you-buy-eight-separate-tickets-on-a-Tuesday-when-it's-a-full-moon. No, really. British railway prices are that obscure.

Unfortunately it's a nasty set of Windows executables and DLLs feeding off a handful of proprietary data files. Reverse-engineering these packed data files shouldn't be too difficult (ok, this is about the one time in history you'll hear me admit it would actually have been less horrid if they'd used XML) but I'm not sure I've got the time. Anyone?

I just like the idea of, one day, launching an online journey-planner that managed to find completely legal ways of halving train fares, thereby getting one over the bunch of scrotes currently "running" "our" "railway" "system".

Comments

There was an article today in the News of the World (ahem, it wasn't *my* copy, honest) which highlighted that you can easily buy two tickets for longer journeys - one for the 'peak' part of your journey and the remainder for when it's 'off-peak' - which works out considerably cheaper. Would this data contain this information?

Posted by Ben on 5.3.07 01:34

It does, yes. The train fares are certainly in there. The validity information (e.g. after 9.30am only) is, but isn't really very machine-parsable - it's in a bizarre ATOC rendition of "English" that seems to have been designed for teletype screens. (It's also one of the few bits I've managed to extract so far!) I'm sure a decent UI could overcome this.

Posted by Richard on 5.3.07 22:46

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