Rail Data Marketplace

The Rail Data Marketplace is a rail data platform operated by the Rail Delivery Group. Some existing open feeds are also offered through the marketplace, some new feeds are only offered through the marketplace.

Background

The RDG states that the Rail Data Marketplace originates in the Joint Rail Data Action Plan, and Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail.

The Joint Rail Data Action Plan is a policy paper published in 2018, which sought to increase rail data sharing across the industry, and which criticised the "perceived closed nature of the railway industry"; The Rail Delivery Group committed in the joint action plan to publishing the CTI and CIGP feeds through the NRDP, but failed to do so. The Williams-Shapps Plan for Rail outlined the strategy and objectives of an "open by default" Rail Data Service under the proposed Great British Railways.

In 2021, the Department for Transport announced £5 million in government funding for a new Rail Data Marketplace, with the Rail Delivery Group selecting Tata Consultancy Services to develop the platform.

Feeds

A summary of some feeds is available here. Every feed requires a separate subscription, and agreement by the user to a separate licence agreement. There are three types of feed - files, pub/sub, and APIs. There's no officially documented or supported mechanism for retrieving files from the Rail Data Marketplace in software.

Substitutions

• Some fares, timetable, and routeing file feeds can be replaced with DTD files, which can be retrieved automatically from the NRDP.
• KB feeds are APIs – not files – on the RDM, but it may still be more convenient to access these through the NRDP instead of the RDM, as you'll only need to enable one subscription, with one set of secrets.
• Similarly, it may be more convenient to use the LDB SOAP service instead of the RDM offering, which is split across multiple endpoints, with separate secrets.
• The "Staff Version" web service on the RDM doesn't currently work, the LDBSVWS SOAP service is the only alternative (see here for special registration information about LDBSVWS).
• The "Darwin Real Time Train Information" feed on the RDM is the only pub/sub feed, but doesn't work. That aside, it's only offered in an alternative schema-less JSON format, and via Apache Kafka, instead of the more conventional OpenWire or STOMP. The only alternative is the NRDP's push port.

Criticism

The Rail Data Marketplace is controversial among feeds users.