We’ve continued to make updates to RailMiles over the last few weeks since our last update including many frequently requested features over the years. This one’s a big one - so here goes.

Dark mode

The most requested feature of the last year. We’ve added dark mode to the whole of RailMiles. If your computer, tablet or phone is set to ‘dark mode’ then you’ll now see the new dark mode version. We’ll add a configurable option to choose it in a future update.

Stats (public pages) now available inside My RailMiles

We’ve added a new area inside My RailMiles: Stats Home. This area is essentially a copy of the public pages that are available at your chosen subdomain but gives easier access to all the journeys and stats that you’ve added into My RailMiles.

RTT Integration

As we hinted at with the rollout of RTT+ & RailMiles packages, we intended to more closely link the two. We’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes and have swapped out the API powering the RailMiles journey search to our new one currently in late development.

RailMiles will now recognise your RTT+ subscription (if you have one!) and the searchable history now encompasses the whole of your subscription window. For most users that’s 5 years, but if you have Extended History it continues back to 2012.

If you don’t have an RTT+ subscription, RailMiles will be able to look back 1 year when adding journeys as before.

Journeys

We have changed the layout to the new and edit journey pages. We’ve merged the four timing boxes into two, representing origin and destination. Each box now contains the respective actual and planned timings as well as location timezone.

You can choose in Service Settings which one you’d like to be shown first; we’ve defaulted this to actual timings to keep in line with the prior layout.

Splitting out buses

We realise a lot of people like to denote the difference between a scheduled bus service and a rail replacement bus. We’ve split those out in RailMiles and you can now choose either. All pre-existing journeys have been left on the old ‘Bus’ option.

Travel class

It’s now possible to define what class of travel you used on a journey, we’ve added Standard, Standard Premium, First, Sleeper Cabin and Sleeper Couchette for now. If you think we’ve missed one, let us know via support!

Distance units

We’ve added the ability to show journeys in decimal miles and kilometres to the public pages globally, and also individually in each journey. The setting for your public pages can be found in ‘Public Site Settings’, and the default for journeys can be found in ‘Service Settings’.

You can set a journey to be defined in either miles and chains, decimal miles or kilometres. This will be saved into the journey, but the public pages will show the global setting other than in the Journey Details (the magnifying glass).

Service Origin & Destination

This was added in our last update but we’ve now made it visible. Users have requested over the years to be able to log the underlying service’s origin & destination (e.g. on a journey from York to Newcastle, the train was actually a King’s Cross to Edinburgh): we’ve now added that into My RailMiles and it will automatically populate for journeys found in RTT.

We will be running a backdating process throughout February and March that will try and auto-fill these on all user journeys.

Detailed Traction

We have received many comments over the years about how RailMiles defines a ‘class’ from a TOPS number and disregards other systems. We’ve also long thought about how we can improve how it handles portion working, where a service gains or loses coaches en route.

We’re solving that with our new detailed traction option. It’s entirely optional and the existing simple approach remains accessible: all users are defaulted to simple so this is an opt-in service.

‘Detailed Traction’ goes beyond defining purely an identity for a unit, locomotive, etc. You can now set its class, distance travelled, origin and destination. You can change the class to whatever you like. Traction List and League will account for these classes and group journeys appropriately.

It’s most easily explained with this screenshot below of a train from Weymouth to Waterloo gaining coaches at Bournemouth.

Detailed Traction screenshot showing a Weymouth to Waterloo service gaining coaches at Bournemouth

Public Site

We’re preparing for a much larger update to the public site in the coming months with some planned improvements, but we’ve made several small changes in relation to the new features mentioned above.

One small thing before we continue mainly aimed at software developers! We’re aware there are software packages to download data through the underpinning private API to the public pages. We have replaced this API mostly in the interests of improving site performance so those will no longer work. We are progressing on work to bring in an actual RailMiles read-only API and will have more on that later this year.

New visibility settings

We’ve added some new settings that allow users to share their home (or landing) page but restrict the rest of their site. This is available on ‘hidden’ (i.e. just you) or ‘visible for friends’.

Traction List & Traction League

If you have detailed traction enabled on your site, Traction List & League have just become a lot more powerful. Search class will be used to group traction together and we’ve dropped the limitation on just ‘Train’ mode journeys. You can go ahead and see how far you’ve travelled on London Underground S stock!

Journey Details

Journey Details is that popup if you hit the magnifying glass on the journey list - just in case you were wondering!

We’ve rebuilt this entirely from scratch to add more of the data held in RailMiles. This is especially true for users who enable detailed traction - it’ll now give the full run down. The distance units may not match the rest of the public site as Journey Details will show the distance defined within the journey itself (see above!)

We’ve also added an icon highlighting visibility if its hidden or visible only to friends.

We’ve added an RTT link to the journey list if the data is populated, so you can look back at the journey on RTT. That link has also been added to the Journey Details popup.

Bug fixes

This post was published in categories: RailMiles