Darwin:Push Port

About

The Darwin Push Port is an XML push feed that continuously streams information about the creation of, and changes to, train schedule records, together with train running predictions made by Darwin.

The Push Port can be filtered to a specific area of interest by TIPLOC, or to provide information for the entire country. Either way, the information delivered is complex and must be properly interpreted before presentation to end users.

The Push Port requires the user to build a database capable of capturing extremely high volumes of information, as well as a query engine to draw the information from your database. There is a large amount of interpretation work involved in this; however this allows substantial flexibility to apply the information to any product within the limitations of your own infrastructure.

Availability

The Darwin Push Port feed is expected to be available by 31st March 2015.

Data

The Push Port has three components:

Reference Data, available over FTP once a day
Timetable, available over FTP once a day
Real-time updates, available over Stomp

XSDs for the interface are available.

Reference Data

The reference data contains:

TIPLOCs, CRS codes, TOC codes and location names
TOC codes, names and website URLs
Late Running reason codes and text
Cancellation reason codes and text
Via locations
CIS codes and names

Timetable

There are two components to the Darwin Timetable:

A timetable snapshot, available once a day via FTP
Schedule updates via the Real-time feed (see below)

Real-time Updates

NOTE: All messages in the real-time update stream are sent in XML with the message body compressed using gzip.

Each message in the update feed contains update response element, which is in turn nested inside a 'Pport' element:

Schedule data
Association data
Actual and Forecast data
Train Order data
Station Messages
Train Alert data
Tracking ID corrections
Alarms

How do I get the data?

To access the data feeds you must register for an account at https://datafeeds.nationalrail.co.uk. Once you have submitted the registration form, you should receive a confirmation email. Follow the instructions in the email and set your new password. Once you have set your password and signed in, navigate to the data feeds screen by clicking on the My Feeds link at the top of the page. On this screen you can find your personal queue name along with the username and password required to connect to the message queue. The My Feeds screen also has the connection details for the FTP download folder, from where you can download the latest Darwin timetable, reference data file, and the daily snapshot file. All Push Port messages that are older than 5 minutes are also placed in this FTP folder in log files. Each log file contains 5 minutes of Push Port messages.