It’s that time of year again and today RTT turns 10.

It’s been very busy behind the scenes at RTT Towers this year with a lot of work that we unfortunately cannot talk about - but we’ve been working on some rather exciting things for the industry. We’ve been going through some growing pains as a result of that too - which is why we’ve been so quiet.

We’re pondering organising something ‘bigger’ to celebrate our 10th birthday but that probably will have to wait until next year. Keep an eye out on our Twitter and Facebook pages.

We’re still working on a couple of very new things for the public side of things: now that the pandemic has somewhat settled we’re able to get back working on those and they should hopefully see the light of day in the next year. Europe, anyone?

Back in the UK, we’ve got a number of new updates:

Know Your Train

Class 802 Paragon ‘Know Your Train’ diagram Class 168 Chiltern Mainline ‘Know Your Train’ diagram

We are delighted to be welcoming Chiltern Railways, Grand Central and Hull Trains to the Know Your Train service.

Know Your Train is our way of providing more information about the actual train operating than anything else. We will tell you what the train will look like, what facilities you can expect to find onboard and where your coach will be.

Alex Walker, Head of Operations at Hull Trains, said:

We are delighted to announce that customers can now get live information on our unit allocation via the Realtime Trains website on this, their 10th anniversary. Our modern, Class 802 Paragon fleet is running 10-car formations more than ever before, and this is yet another way for passengers to keep informed about Hull Trains’ services. We wish Realtime Trains a happy anniversary and look forward to partnering with them moving forward.

It is now available on 15 mainline passenger train operators and one heritage railway, with allocations available on two freight & charter operators.

A number of operators are now highlighting on stations when particular rolling stock is operating on a service. We’ve also added in simple and detailed mode (on mobile only, for now) the ability to quickly see the following:

Other small updates

We’re continuing a number of small updates to the software that operates the site and have recently updated a lot of the underlying software packages that support some of the front-end utility.

On a final note, we’ve migrated RTT over to a new Network Rail platform which seems to be somewhat more stable. Over the last few weeks completing over the weekend, the obfuscation process that has been applied to freight train services over the last decade and, as such, freight train services are now presented in the clear.

Onto the next decade!

This post was published in categories: Realtime Trains