Project Summary

1Timetable has created CoreTimetable – a collaborative platform allowing reliable, easy and secure sharing of schedule, vehicle and crew data for pubic transport operators. The platform allows for the simple and efficient inputting and retrieval of data, allowing collaboration between operators across the industry. It also enables data analysis and interpretation, setting new standards for data
management.

Project Achievements

The CoreTimetable project was created to tackle the challenge to ensure the rail industry was equipped with the integrated systems and data necessary to reliably deliver ‘better performing, more responsive and efficient timetables’. Our project has tackled this by creating the industry’s first curated and standardised platform for timetable data collaboration. CoreTimetable is designed to hold all of the information required to understanding rail operations; the timetable, the vehicles and the train crew. Additionally every deployment of CoreTimetable, whether belonging to a passenger or freight operating company, NR, GBR or the DfT, is capable of secure communication and data sharing. This unique capability enables organisation A to give full or partial sight of their timetable to organisation B at the click of a button.

Conclusions

We are proud to have tackled a problem that was first identified in the Industry Timetable Technical Strategy, a document that was borne from the disruption caused by the May 2018 national railway timetable change. Although the strategy was not able to be progressed due to financial challenges, the need for industry parties to collaborate remains as strong as ever. We saw that this problem was not being addressed and so set about establishing CoreTimetable. We have enabled operators to move away from using the daily CIF as their source of national railway timetable data – which is in a format that is over 30 years old, expensive for stakeholders to process and misses the crucial information of vehicles and crew. CoreTimetable’s API offers a JSON structured
output that significantly reduces the technical burden on organisations across the industry looking to use timetable data.

Next Steps

Our next steps are to roll out CoreTimetable to more operators, provide additional data layers such as passenger count and to use all this combined data to truly test the timetable’s resilience using historic running data. We are in contact with a provider of events data which we intend to incorporate in to our platform, so train operators can see large events by location and can plan trains to satisfy demand accordingly. We are developing resilience metrics so that the ability of the timetable to cope with delays can be easily understood from the initial planning stage, rather than having to rely on expensive and timely simulation software. Once we have proven the functionality of our passenger count, events and resilience data, in collaboration with the operators that we have established well trusted working relationships with, we will be seeking commercial deals in the coming months.