National Rail Data Portal

The National Rail Data Portal is National Rail's data platform, through which users can subscribe to HSP, Darwin, DTD, and KnowledgeBase. The platform is capable of delivering CIGP (Customer Information GPS Platform) and CTI (Connecting Train Identifiers); these APIs and feeds aren't currently available to open data users.

Only the Knowledgebase API and DTD are available directly through NRDP's API, the other subscriptions (including real-time KB incidents) are accessed externally, using the information included in the My Feeds tab.

New users can register using the registration form on https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/

CIGP and CTI

CIGP (Customer Information GPS Platform), also referred to as TLMS (Train Location Monitoring System), locates services physically using GPS data provided by train operators, CTI (Connecting Train Identifiers) corresponds services to the specific trains which run them. These were first announced in the Joint Rail Data Action Plan in 2018,, and went live with version 3 of the NRDP in early 2019, but neither has been made available to open data users, owing to operator reluctance and security concerns. CIGP and CTI both have API and real-time components, but no documentation has been published on either.

Authentication

To authenticate, POST to https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/authenticate with form parameters "username" and "password" set accordingly - the request must be urlencoded, and not multipart.

For example, if the username was alice@example.com, and the password was hunter2%^, the request would look like this:

POST /authenticate HTTP/1.1
Host: opendata.nationalrail.co.uk
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 51

username=alice%40example.com&password=hunter2%25%5E

Using curl:

curl 'https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/authenticate' \
     --data-urlencode 'username=alice@example.com' \
     --data-urlencode 'password=hunter2%^'

Successful authentication should yield a JSON object with three keys.

• username is self-explanatory.
• roles contains only the roles your account has, this example is missing ROLE_DTD and ROLE_HSP_USER, because the user is not subscribed to them.
• token is your authentication token, which includes your username, the time the token will expire (expressed in milliseconds since the UNIX epoch), and finally the secret.

{
    "username":"alice@example.com",
    "roles":
    {
        "ROLE_DARWIN":true,
        "ROLE_KB_REAL_TIME":true,
        "ROLE_STANDARD":true,
        "ROLE_KB_API":true
    },
    "token":"alice@example.com:1702858757000:JAlA9FAzcdFAfDAZX8a1JYIsXaa4uFNDI0qaePaXRQA="
}

If the username or password are invalid:

{"error":"Invalid username/password"}

Authenticating requests

The token should be supplied in full with each request made to NRDP in the X-Auth-Token header, e.g.

curl 'https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/2.0/routeing' \
     -H 'X-Auth-Token: alice@example.com:1702858757000:JAlA9FAzcdFAfDAZX8a1JYIsXaa4uFNDI0qaePaXRQA=' \
     --output routeing.zip

If the token is expired or invalid, instead of the routeing zip:

{
  "timestamp": "2023-12-18T00:56:23.284+0000",
  "status": 401,
  "error": "Unauthorized",
  "message": "Unauthorized",
  "path": "/api/staticfeeds/2.0/routeing"
}

Endpoints

NRDP

All NRDP endpoints return JSON

https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/feeds

Contents of the feeds page, including feed URLs and credentials

https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/feeds/available

Available feeds, not user-specific, but platform-wide. Doesn't offer any information that isn't already a given.

• "DARWIN" - Darwin
• "DTD" - Fares, Routeing Guide and Timetable data
• "KB_API" - Knowledgebase (KB) API
• "KB_REAL_TIME" - Knowledgebase (KB) Real Time Incidents
• "HSP" - Historical Service Performance (HSP)
• "CIGP_API" - Customer Information GPS Platform (CIGP) API
• "CIGP_REAL_TIME" - Customer Information GPS Platform (CIGP) Real Time Feed
• "CTI_API" - Connecting Train Identifiers (CTI) API
• "CTI_REAL_TIME" - Connecting Train Identifiers (CTI) Real Time Feed

Example

["DTD","KB_API","KB_REAL_TIME","DARWIN","HSP"]

https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/user

Can be used to either get (GET) or update (POST) user information, the same JSON object is used for both, simply set the changed values (e.g. to enable HSP in the below example, set "hspUser" to true)

Example

{
    "telephone":"",
    "cigpApiUser":false,
    "cigpRealTimeUser":false,
    "ctiApiUser":false,
    "ctiRealTimeUser":false,
    "darwinUser":true,
    "dtdUser":false,
    "hspUser":false,
    "kbApiUser":true,
    "kbRealTimeUser":true,
    "business":null,
    "email":"alice@example.com",
    "name":"Alice Smith",
    "plannedUsage":"",
    "usageDetails":
    {
        "website":"https://example.com/~alice/ldb",
        "screens":"",
        "researchAndDevelopment":"",
        "applications":"",
        "software":"AliceLDB",
        "dataFeedIntegration":"",
        "other":""
    }
}

DTD

All DTD feeds are ZIP files

• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/2.0/fares
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/2.0/routeing
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/3.0/timetable

KB API

All KB API feeds are XML

• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/4.0/serviceIndicators
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/5.0/incidents
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/4.0/tocs
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/4.0/ticket-restrictions
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/4.0/ticket-types
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/4.0/promotions-publics
• https://opendata.nationalrail.co.uk/api/staticfeeds/4.0/stations