I’ve spent most of the last week in Scotland checking out various items of interest and gathering data for future plans.

We’ve a lot of plans for 2020.

In the third in our series of posts about offsets, this one covers the missing link as to why we, and the industry, use offsets to report train movements.

One of the major differences between Realtime Trains and other sites is our work around offsets, the way in which realtime reporting happens at a vast majority of locations across the network. Aviemore was recently resignalled as part of the Highland Main Line upgrades, with a new Train Describer, and this is what we did to enable accurate live reporting.

Offsets are one of the key parts of reporting accurate arrival and departure times across the rail network. Network Rail collect their own set for the industry as part of ‘The Margin Book’ which gets incorporated into SMART. Realtime Trains collects its own. This blog post is about the processes and more about the mechanisms that are followed.