Two Realtime Traintracking websites or apples and oranges
Written by Rajesh Kumar on November 13, 2008 – 2:58 pm
Having grown up traveling long distances in trains in India (Since 1989 kms, have stayed more than a thousand kms away from the city my parents lived in). As a student, I used trains extensively for the travel and if you have travelled even half as much as I have done, you would know that ascertaining the location of a train in India can be such a problem.
No more, because someone has started this mashup that gives useful bytes of information. It gives fairly detailed position but not real time information which is still pretty good. I wish someone could give me a solution to an answer that I oh-so-frequently heard from the Railway Enquiry office which was that the train is almost in (In Hindi, the answer used to be ‘Outer par khadi hai’). The same answer would be repeated for upto an hour sometimes!
The second must see site is this Mashup which mocks up Swiss Rail train movements. This site lets you almost travel with the train and see birds eye view of locations as a train passes along but does not use real data but only simulates the movements and the stoppages based on the time table.
And if you thought not having real time data is a bad idea, wait till you read the below notice available from the Swiss Rail mashup. You have obviously forgotten that Swiss Trains operate on time and hence real time data is inconsequential and so wasteful of money!
Posted in Fun |
November 16th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Thanks for the links. Most of the rly stations now even have an LCD tv which shows the minute to minute tracking of the trains. That feature I feel is pretty useful for passengers.
November 19th, 2008 at 1:02 am
Great sites. Thanks for sharing. I checked out the Indian site. I especially liked the smart search between Stations feature, which is dead-on accurate in showing trains stopping at nearby stations. Being a frequent Indian train traveller myself, I discovered some new trains (I wasn’t even aware of these trains before!!!) that made my trips more efficient. I really, really DON’T CARE about the real-time train tracking feature, but that’s just me.
As for the Swiss site, I think showing train movements in real-time is just a timepass toy gimmick, since it is using the pre-prepared timetable to interpolate the position. So I ask you, if Swiss trains are “always on time”, why even have a web-site showing train movements? We need the real position of a train ONLY in those rare situations when the train is held up due to an accident/repair, etc. In those situations, this website is useless, since it will still show that the train is moving “as per schedule”!!!
But, even so, I won’t discourage either of these websites from continuing to improve, since as Michael Faraday said, when questioned about the utility of electricity “Of what use is a new-born child”.
You have a nice blog, BTW. Keep it up.