Piccadilly Night Tube

Open Data
1

Hi all,

Any chance TfL will do an extraordinary TxC data release this week? Asking because the Piccadilly Line night tube trips are not included in this week’s release, as the TxC data was updated before the public announcement of the Picc Night Tube reopening.

Any chance that TfL can do an extraordinary deploy to include those trips? Otherwise have to manually patch things up…

Many thanks :pray:

Linked to this topic :slight_smile: Missing Northern Line Night Tube trips

1 Like
2

There’s a PDF of WTT online…

1 Like
3

ah thanks @briantist . Unfortunately we cannot use this, as this format is too complex to integrate in our app for tomorrow evening… Interesting to see the operational side of things nonetheless

1 Like
4

Of course.

It is interesting that TfL manages to produce the PDF file ahead of the pure-data form being published, given what a right pain they must be to produce like that, even with 2022 computing resources.

5

The “pure-data form” of the timetable (in the CUF format, which I presume they use to make the TransXChange files) has already existed for over a month, just not been published publicly as the return hadn’t been publicly announced in a press release.

That was probably for the best, since the original plan was for Piccadilly Night Tube to restart last Saturday, but was delayed with only a few days’ worth of notice. Would have been rather embarrassing to release the timetables for a service that didn’t end up running

6

@arturs Thanks.

I think I find it intriguing that there is a distinct impression that Desktop Publishing is sometimes still being used with strange layouts that are required only because of the limitations of paper layouts (for example having to use cross-referenceable sequential page numbers) at places such as Working Timetables (WTT) - Transport for London and very much at (Network Rail’s)
National Electronic Sectional Appendix - Network Rail

To the outsider it always feels like a form of data obfuscation: it’s so hard to reliably decode the contents of PDFs to make automatic decoding impossible.

This is just a observation, of course, not an accusation.

7

That’s because that’s not at all what the PDFs are for - they’re designed to be as easy to read and interpret for railway staff as possible, not for developers or for computational processing. They have to fit paper layouts because they are still printed and handed out to station staff and drivers in the form of books.

It’s not obfuscation - you’re just not the intended audience.

1 Like