Hi James,
Thanks for that. Oddly I don’t seem to be able to get a journey plan using the Elizabeth line from Paddington to Farringdon using a request like:
although the elizabeth-line mode is correctly recognised. Any ideas?
Paddington to Liverpool Street seems to cause an internal error:
this issue is still there. Any news please ?
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Hi @nakkore - it’s still under investigation. The journey planner team and the software vendor are looking into the geocoding in the underlying system. Unfortunately it’s quite an intricate process so is taking some time to get right.
I’ll give you more details when I have them.
Thanks,
James.
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Hi James, just wondering if you are able to give an example journeyresults request using lat/longs with mode set to the elizabeth-line that does work? Or does your reference to geocoding indicate that using lat/longs is not an option at the moment?
Apologies, I forgot to respond to you yesterday.
I have to look into your calls and get back to you.
Thanks,
James
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Hi James. Is there any update on this please, even an estimate of timescales would be useful at this point? Thanks
Hi, we found an issue in the response from the Journey Planner system when doing point-to-point journeys selecting Elizabeth line only mode.
The vendor is still looking into this, hopefully I will have an update by the end of today on how their investigation is progressing.
Thanks,
James
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I’ve noticed a few odd things whilst my testing my app. Presumably the data is correct but these seem peculiar:
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Reading. Why do the trains go to Ealing Broadway? Don’t they go to Paddington? https://tfl.gov.uk/elizabeth-line/stop/910GRDNGSTN/reading-rail-station/
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Heathrow T4. It shows on the route map. I guess there’s no trains there yet? https://tfl.gov.uk/elizabeth-line/stop/910GHTRWTM4
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Farringdon. No trains. Farringdon - Transport for London
I noticed some years back that concourse (and platform) indicators at Gatwick showed most of the Victoria trains terminating at Clapham Junction. The idea presumably was to divert people onto the Gatwick Express, or at any rate a fast service, on the basis that they would get to Victoria quicker by waiting for the next fast train. The Gatwick Express also had higher fares so would generate more income.
Obviously the same argument on journey time applies for Reading to Paddington but there is a crucial difference, that for some travellers (such as Freedom Pass holders) only the Elizabeth Line will do. If it is similar to the Gatwick position, it would also seem to imply that the data you are picking up from TfL for their own service is actually being generated from a National Rail system, or at least that it is parroting what the indicators at the station say…
To rubbish my own argument, last time I was at Gatwick the more modern indicators did not seem to be hiding the final destination of Victoria trains…
In regards to point #2, Heathrow Terminal 4 has been closed since May 2020 and so hasn’t seen a train in passenger service in 2 years…
Current target for reopening is the 14th of June this year.
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Any update James? This is taking a long time.
Hi - I’ve chased for an update from the supplier.
Thanks,
James
The first one is the “false destination” issue: when an express train will reach the destination first the stopping train shows the stop before as the destination. See also Overground trains from Watford Junction to Euston.
The terminal 4 issue has been around for a ages.
Farringdon. The data is there in Darwin - RTI works
The stop works in Darwin - Live Trains Status and Departures Boards | National Rail + use “FDX” for Farringdon EL.
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Hi @dev_rob
The 2 answers you have for 1 & 2 are correct.
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Ealing Broadway is the destination text that comes back from the Darwin system. This is as stated above due to the fact this is a stopping service. When through trains go from Reading into the central section, this will no longer display.
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T4 is due to open on June 14th, we’re currently working through the data changes to re-activate the Paddington <> Terminal 4 route section in the API.
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Farringdon currently has no predictions due to a data change in Darwin. This is also the case for Abbey Wood, Whitechapel, Liverpool Street and Paddington. We’re working on updating our reference data to display these predictions correctly. I’ll update here once we’ve got a fix in (hopefully not too long!)
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I suppose there’s some sense in that. But not at Reading. If you’re travelling with a Freedom Pass and starting from Reading, you can’t take the faster train and you also have no way of finding which platform the correct train starts from. The only way I could work it out was to walk from platform to platform until I found one that showed a train departing at the time that Journey Planner had told me was a train to Paddington (and hope that there wasn’t another train departing from another platform at exactly the same time).
This is also true for the other places where falseDest/fdTiploc data is shown by the Darwin Live Departure Boards (also on the trains). I guess the reasoning is that if the timetable shows that the fastest way to reach the destination is another train, 99% of passenger want to get to that place the quickest way.
This is also true for places (Stratford, Wakefield Westgate, Watford Junction) where Darwin shows trains as “set down only” because the “correct” train to take to certain places isn’t the long-distance train, but the local one.
This is an attempt to explain the official reasoning, rather than my personal view.
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It’s possible to remove the false destinations from the Darwin data by looking for keys with falseDest or fdTiploc in them.
(However, this might be a problem because Southeastern “loop” trains change their falseDest many times as they go around.)
It’s been a week and still no reply
Update on the changes to line ID and mode ID mentioned above.
To recap, as mentioned on 10 May the new values are:
Line ID: 'elizabeth’
Mode ID: 'elizabeth-line’
The following legacy values will shortly no longer be supported:
Line ID: 'tfl-rail’
Mode ID: 'tflrail’
They are likely to go out of support today or very soon.
Let me know if any questions.