Open Data Releases

This page lists data that has been made available from the rail and transport industry.

Network Rail

• Network Rail Datafeeds, providing real-time train movement information from Network Rail's internal systems. You will need a reasonable level of technical skill to interpret the data.
• The Sectional Appendix, containing detailed information of lines, routes, junctions and permitted speeds. This data is updated in June and December each year, an extract of the data in TSV and XLSX is here and historical versions of the Sectional Appendix are available for reference.
• Working Timetables - schedules for passenger, empty passenger, freight and infrastructure trains.
• Engineering Access Statement/Train Planning Rules, Data relating to planned engineering blockades and constraints on timetable planning.
• Signalbox Opening Times
• Level Crossing Safety - the underlying data is available in JSON format

Railway Safety and Standards Board

• RSSB has a list of current and withdrawn Railway Group Standards current and withdrawn Railway Group Standards, Rail Industry Approved Codes of Practice (RACOPs), guidance notes and and Rail Industry Standards. Registration is required to access this data.

Office of Rail and Road

• ORR Data Portal, including Signals Passed at Danger (SPADs), volume of freight movement, historical Public Performance Measure data, passenger train revenue and temporary speed restrictions.

RDG

• Passenger timetable data from RDG in Common Interchange File format
• London Terminals data from RDG, detailing the valid London station used when travelling from a particular station
• Fares data from RDG - see Fares Data

Transport for London

• TfL Open Data, where you can sign up for access to numerous feeds, including live traffic camera images, real-time bus arrivals, Tube departure boards, station locations, a journey planner and tube disruption data.
• Trackernet - Legacy feed for real-time London Underground information, with some operational information not offered by TfL's unified API.

Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM)

• TfGM Real-Time Open Data Portal - Data from TfGM, presented as OData, a REST-style API.

Documentation is provided by a user-unfriendly Microsoft Azure portal. The endpoint URLs and parameters are documented, but there's no documentation on response fields, or interpretation.

The only Metrolink information currently available is an overview of the information TfGM's CIS is displaying at PIDs at stops, and is organised by PID, not location.

Example:

{
    "Id": 127854, "Line": "Airport", "TLAREF": "AIR", "PIDREF": "AIR-TPID01",
    "StationLocation": "Manchester Airport", "AtcoCode": "9400ZZMAAIR1", "Direction": "Incoming",
    "Dest0": "Firswood", "Carriages0": "Single", "Status0": "Due", "Wait0": "7",
    "Dest1": "", "Carriages1": "", "Status1": "", "Wait1": "",
    "Dest2": "", "Carriages2": "", "Status2": "", "Wait2": "",
    "Dest3": "", "Carriages3": "", "Status3": "", "Wait3": "",
    "MessageBoard": "Due to overhead line damage Airport services are operating to Firswood only. Please use Didsbury services for onward travel into the City Centre. Please see TFGM.com",
    "LastUpdated": "2023-06-13T15:31:28Z"
  }

High Speed Two Ltd

• data.gov.uk has details the route of the planned HS2 line. This data is now no longer published, but was in ESRI Shapefile format, licenced under Open Government Licence (OGL)

British Transport Police

• Data.gov.uk has crime stats for stations and trains in Jan to August 2012

OpenStreetMap.org

• OpenStreetMap contains most of the UK rail network at varying levels of detail. Some stations are tagged with naptan:AtcoCode and/or a CRS reference, and some have routes associated with them. The Osmosis application could be used to pull nodes and ways from an OSM planet dump/extract.

Non-UK data

Some of this data is fully open, other data is available for casual use but without clear licensing conditions.

• SNCF Open Data is the open data project from French national operator, SNCF.
• NS API for all Dutch trains is a great, simple API including stations, schedules, and realtime feeds.
• Irail is a Belgian non-profit initiative with the aim of opening up transportation data.
• eRail.in Indian Railways API.
• DB Open-Data-Portal for open rail data in Germany.
• SBB Open Data for open rail data in Switzerland.
• Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) API - real-time information in (schemaless) XML

Sweden

• Trafikinfo API for trains operating in Sweden provided by Trafikverket, the Swedish Transport Administration.
• Järnvägsdata contains geographical data of railway infrastructure in ESRI Shapefile format.

Finland

Finland has an extensive open rail data platform thanks to the government's open-data initiative.

• rata.digitraffic.fi API for trains operating in Finland.
• Infra-API for railway infrastructure.
• Jeti-API for planned (maintenance) restrictions.

Norway

Entur AS was created in 2016 to unify ticketing, journey planning, and passenger information throughout Norway, on all public transport modes. BaneNOR is the infrastructure owner/operator (similar to Network Rail) and also publishes some data.

• Entur Real-time information in SIRI and GTFS-RT
• Entur Stops and timetables (NeTEx)
• Entur Journey planner (GraphQL)
• BaneNOR Event issuer (Webhooks) real-time position of trains, possibly more, documentation is lacking, and the "Event issuer" is quite new.

See also

• FOI Requests