
Nuts and bolts: our routing algorithm - Signez
https://blog.captaintrain.com/9159-our-routing-algorithm
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boultonmark
Can someone from Captain Train explain where they have gotten the European
Rail Timetable Data from? Because there is a huge issue in Europe over that
data not being Open Data. The rail governing body the UIC collects each member
train company's timetables and merges/cleans them into a dataset called
Merits. If you ask the UIC as many Open Data campaigners and interested
companies for that dataset they say "Only the Operators can have it". That
dataset then goes to the company that supplies most of the European train
companies journey planning Hacon (via a dept of Deutsche Bahn first). Hacon
also won't license you the data. They too say 'it's the train operators'. And
Deutsche Bahn will only license you the Hacon API (i.e not the raw data).
Train Captain where are you getting this data from? Because you must be the
only independent non-train operator in Europe to have it. And according to the
rules I've encountered you shouldn't.

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gmac
Just a thought, but I wonder if [https://loco2.com](https://loco2.com) have it
too?

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joelhaasnoot
Their blog about this recently is here: [https://loco2.com/blog/more-powerful-
rail-journey-planning](https://loco2.com/blog/more-powerful-rail-journey-
planning)

Reading between the lines it seems they license the Hacon API from Deutsche
Bahn

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boultonmark
Yeah it's the Hacon API like [http://www.thetrainline-
europe.com/](http://www.thetrainline-europe.com/) use. That is not the raw
data but a journey-planning API. You need to spend 15k to become a licensed
Deutsche Bahn partner and then pay Hacon per query. But the Captain Train post
seems to be talking about them doing their own journey planning from raw
schedule data. I just want to know how they got it when no-one else including
Loco2 can get it.

~~~
boultonmark
Update from CaptainTrain in the comments in my reply to where do you get the
data:

"It’s magic. :) To be honest, this is a strategic topic we can’t comment on.
I’m sorry."

i.e they have it via a backdoor - someone is giving them it who shouldn't or
they're scraping it.

~~~
joelhaasnoot
The backdoors aren't hard to guess BTW - one noteable source is reverse
engineering the HaCon offline products.

