Train Movements

The Train Movements feed contains data from Network Rail's TRUST system. This reports on the progress of trains along their journey.

There's a fuller description of the process available.

Because of the way TRUST works not every location will generate a report. If you want fine grain reporting then you would need to look at processing data from the TD feed and reporting based on that, or look at the Darwin Push Port data. Darwin will generally capture more, better quality, and ad-hoc data as its part of the bigger customer information system - TRUST is an internal reporting tool and can be updated in 'slow time' meaning data can change or be late being input. A good example is cancelled services - they may be input to Darwin via another source (Darwin Workstation, Tyrell, CIS) leading to a cancellation, the actual TRUST cancellation may not come through till much later.

TRUST data may also be updated/amended 'after the fact' so a delay which is input manually from TRUST DA may overwrite a previous automatic report and that could happen several days later. TRUST should always be historically correct.

TRUST does not provide predictions, it only reports on events that have happened. TRUST reports in 30 second intervals, and rounds to whole minuets. - A train reporting 1 minute early or late may only be 31 seconds early or late in reality.

Message Topics

Train movement messages are available through ActiveMQ TOC-specific topics, as well as an 'all TOCs' topic. You should note that the list of topics you can subscribe too may not match the list of TOC Codes on this wiki. Where a new operator is added to the system it may not show up in the individual topic lists for a while, however the data is sent to the TRAIN_MVT_ALL_TOC topic by default. Once the individual topic is listed data will then be filtered as per below. If you notice a missing or incorrect operator then please email support.

Topic name	Description
TRAIN_MVT_XX_TOC	Train movement messages for XX TOC. XX is the Network Rail business code from the TOC Codes page. For example, CrossCountry has business code 'EH', and its topic is TRAIN_MVT_EH_TOC.
TRAIN_MVT_ALL_TOC	All train operating companies
TRAIN_MVT_FREIGHT	All non-passenger train operating company movements
TRAIN_MVT_GENERAL	Change of Identity messages for freight trains

Message types

The feed contains eight message types, all in JSON format:

• 0001 - Train Activation
• 0002 - Train Cancellation
• 0003 - Train Movement
• 0004 - Unidentified Train (Not used in production)
• 0005 - Train Reinstatement
• 0006 - Change of Origin
• 0007 - Change of Identity
• 0008 - Change of Location

Delay Attribution-related messages are not available.

NOTE - A Train Activation message will always be the first message to be received for a train, after which any of the other message types may be received.

Format

Each message is represented as a JSON hash with two keys - 'header' and 'body'. Zero or more of these messages is sent out in a JSON list, either every five seconds or when there are 32 messages to be sent. It is perfectly legitimate to receive an empty array.

All timestamp values are in milliseconds since the UNIX epoch. But it appears that in certain fields this is incorrect during British Summer Time (UK DST) and is actually one hour in the future. You will need to subtract one hour in order for the times to be valid. This is known to affect the following fields. (There may be others);

• gbtt_timestamp
• planned_timestamp
• actual_timestamp
• canx_timestamp
• dep_timestamp
• orig_loc_timestamp