
Indian Railways, live on Google Maps - beingpractical
http://railradar.trainenquiry.com/
======
rashkov
"An illiterate child from a small town in India falls asleep on a train and
ends up lost in Calcutta, unable to find his way back home. Twenty-five years
later, while living with his adoptive family in Australia, he locates his lost
hometown using memories and Google Earth. (David Kushner, Vanity Fair)"
[http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/11/india-orphan-
googl...](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/11/india-orphan-google-earth-
journey?src=longreads)

~~~
rburhum
That was a great read. Thank you!

~~~
rashkov
Glad you enjoyed it! Full credit goes to longreads.com

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fredley
At time of writing, 59% of trains are delayed. I have very fond memories of
train travel in India. I learned a lot about relaxing, and going with the
flow.

~~~
maddalab
59% of trains delayed is not an accurate representation. IR has what is known
as an operating schedule provided for intermediate stations which differs from
the published schedule. The intermediate and published schedules are
synchronized at major junctions along the way. The operating schedule has
slack built in. A train running late by upto an hour usually arrives on or
before time at major and terminating stations. A case in point right at this
instance 65% of the trains are on schedule, checking during the morning hours
in India will show a higher on time percentage on time as trains approach
terminating stops.

~~~
bbgm
Correct. I don't know if this is still true, but there used to be an effort to
keep a greater percentage of trains on time by delaying already late trains
further (by prioritizing on time trains over them).

As a railway brat, I miss long distance train travel like crazy.

~~~
hm8
It's still true. Though IR is doing a good job of reducing delays.

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yogrish
Very nice app esp. in context of India where train timings are highly
unpredictable.How are they getting real time data - GPS fitted or Indian rail
opened APIs?

Good that they mentioned why it is not exact real time ..."For security and
regulatory reasons, the information published on RailRadar is delayed for 5 or
more minutes."

edit: Rephrased.

~~~
jagira
Indian Railways has numerous monitoring stations. (mainly at railway stations)
These monitoring stations update train's location when trains pass 'em.

In between such points, IR may know train's realtime location, but it is not
made public.

 _Update_

It is mentioned on the site that there are 6000 monitoring stations. Which
means that, on average, there is a monitoring station every 11 kms (66k Km/
6000). Considering an average speed of 80kmph, the location shown on the app
can at max be 8.25 minutes old.

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dbloom
The same thing can be done with SF MUNI.
[http://www.nextmuni.com/googleMap/?a=sf-
muni&r=KT&r=...](http://www.nextmuni.com/googleMap/?a=sf-
muni&r=KT&r=N&r=M&r=L&r=J&d=KT__OB1&s=7354)

I check this before I leave every morning. I live just north of the Muni Metro
East yard, so I can tell when a nice empty train is about to go into service
and run over to the station just in time to catch it.

(In theory you can enable every train and bus line at once, but after a
certain point the page never loads)

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dan1234
This is very nice, but does it breach Google's Ts&Cs with regard to business
asset tracking? I only ask because I wanted to make something similar (though
not India or trains)

<https://developers.google.com/maps/terms> section 10.2b(iii)

~~~
asmithmd1
10.2c(iii) is pretty clear that this use is explicitly allowed:

"you may use the Google Maps API(s) to track assets such as cars, buses or
other vehicles, as long as your tracking application is made available to the
public without charge. For example, you may offer a free, public Maps API
Implementation that displays real-time public transit or other transportation
status information.)"

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vilqqu
Previous discussion on mapping trains:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4595208>

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guard-of-terra
There were quite a few posts like this for different countries, so:
[http://rasp.yandex.ru/map/trains/#center=47.140977%2C54.4277...](http://rasp.yandex.ru/map/trains/#center=47.140977%2C54.427783,zoom=5)

Trains visualized (mostly Russian) This uses their schedules not actual
tracking, but trains tend to run on time now.

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calebjohnclark
By "mapped live" I was hoping to see the trains move on the map. Even if it
wasn't 100% accurate, it would dramatically boost the cool factor to see the
trains animated along the tracks. Just an idea. I love what you've already
built.

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santhoshn
I am not sure how this can be useful for some one. When I want to take a train
journey, I would like to know my train's position a few hours before I leave
or when I am already at that station. I would not be sitting in front of this
website and locating my train. A simple service of informing me about the
delay by SMS would just be good enough. Also, the webpage loads a bit slowly
on my laptop. On my smartphone with a 3G connection, it does not work at all.

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napster265
Good to see the world's largest public sector employer edging towards the
technology !

~~~
arethuza
"world's largest public sector employer"

That dubious honour appears to belong to the US Dept. of Defense:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers>

~~~
z3phyr
Indian railways : more than 5 million employees, I wonder why wikipedia
dosen't list it?

~~~
winkerVSbecks
Actually BBC did an article about this recently because there are a few
misconceptions regarding this title and how many employees do these companies
actually have:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17429786

~~~
vilgax
Please include 'http' in your links to make it click-able.

~~~
winkerVSbecks
didn't notice it was missing the http

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17429786>

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jezclaremurugan
Nice to see this. Hope the praise this gets inspires the Indian Railway to do
something about irctc.co.in, which is far more important.

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sremani
Nicely done, I think the next step is to add granularity so that the user can
focus on one particular region and get more detail.

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Jarihd
Nice app. btw, How are you tracking trains? Is there an API for Indian
railways or are you scraping data from their websites ???

~~~
ajhai
AFAIK, this is done by railyatri.in for Indian Railways

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pkapur86
Love the idea! Thanks for sharing.

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treskot
Can come handy while travelling in India. Especially the little known cities.

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samikc
Excellent map and railway timing integration. very nice

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hna0002
If only the view was not blocked by a zillion ads!

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garry89
Really greate work!!!!!

