
Indian Railways stations, trains and schedules database in JSON and SQL formats - sramana9
http://sramana.in/indianrail-db/
======
rehack
This is highly commendable effort. I have been the lead programmer of an India
based travel search engine, so understand the value of this data.

Another problem to be solved is: Building a cache of seat availability.
Basically, the Indian Railways guys can not provide the availability fast
enough. And it affects every body - from end consumers using their websites,
to OTA sites, to travel-search players.

I can't understand, why no body in the Railways IT dept. (i.e. CRIS) thought
of having a PUSH based cache. The way it can work is each reservation/booking
done causes a PUSH onto the state of the seat availability cache. Which is a
very fast cache (probably based on memcached).

If they allow me, I can code the cache for FREE, for them. Provided they also
stop being so possessive about their data. And allow for apps like yours and
mine to flourish, which ultimately benefit the traveler.

EDIT: minor rephrase

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alagu
Shameless plug: I built a Chrome extension that helps you track all your
Indian Railway tickets in one go -
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/almdggoleggeecgelb...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/almdggoleggeecgelbjekpmefpohdjck)

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rasagy
After noticing a comment on the site, I checked the "Disclaimer" pages on the
2 official sites (Both don't allow storing this data in any form). However,
the 3rd source <http://indiarailinfo.com/> is not affiliated to the gov.

Are there any NGO/organizations that could push for such data to be made
public in India? I'll try getting in touch with CIS (<http://www.cis-
india.org/>).

Disclaimers on: <http://www.indianrail.gov.in/disclaimer.html> &
<http://trainenquiry.com/StaticContent/disclaim.aspx>

~~~
sramana9
Thanks for informing me that it is not legal to scrape
<http://www.indianrail.gov.in>. I am rewriting the code to scrape only
<http://indiarailinfo.com>, which does not explicitly forbid scraping. Is it
legal to scrape such a site (without overloading it)? Is it legal to share
that code?

~~~
rasagy
I'm not sure if there are any general rules/guidelines in India for this.
However, IndianRailInfo doesn't have any Copyright/Disclaimer mentioned on
their homepage. So I see no reason why it should be a problem. Re:Source, till
it's not used to scrape Copyright/private data, it shouldn't be a problem.
Mention this clause in the disclaimer/license. Will you be putting it on
GitHub?

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blntechie
Appreciate the effort. I asked this other day on HN on a related thread. But
is crawling the official sites legal? And also how frequent it's going to be
updated? Just want to make sure before using this in an idea I have for a
Windows phone app.

~~~
alagu
This is definitely not legal - <http://www.indianrail.gov.in/disclaimer.html>.

There was a discussion sometime back in HSI about this -
<http://hackerstreet.in/item?id=6252>

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joelhaasnoot
This is awesome. Doing this for the Netherlands, and there is a public API
(but no schedule API, just a trip planner).

Plans for GTFS? As awful as it seems, it is a nice format and has lots of
tools. In half an hour with OpenTripPlanner and OpenStreetMaps and GTFS data
(and a computer with 16GB RAM) you can have a trip planner ready to go.

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vinutheraj
Error (509) This account's public links are generating too much traffic and
have been temporarily disabled!

~~~
dlsspy
Yeah, I'm really eager to find a mirror. I like playing with data like this
and I'm flying to India tomorrow.

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davidwhodge
I've contacted the site owner and I'll see if I can get a mirror set up for
those files.

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mpunaskar
On side Note : If someone decides to build train timetable site - it would be
highly useful to add Local taxi hire company numbers (near destination
station). It will be highly useful as people would love to pre-book taxis as
well.

~~~
vinutheraj
Is there a way to get such data ? Other than going out an actively contacting
the taxi companies ?

~~~
mpunaskar
I'm not sure about taxi companies data. may be you can scrape it off yellow
pages like sites.

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muxxa
Brilliant. I'm excited about attempting to use the data to produce an Indian
timetable site on top of the frontend I've built for Irish rail and bus;
<http://getthere.ie/>

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mpunaskar
Excellent & highly useful database. Its always helpful to get such type of
data in public domain. This way independent developers can build useful apps
for community.

+1 for efforts.

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anmol
Due time, thanks for doing this. Everytime I'm booking an Indian rail ticket I
cringe at the UI/UX on the official Indian Railways site.

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sramana9
Thanks everyone for the comments. I updated the links and now downloads are
working. Sorry for the delay.

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dhaivatpandya
Maybe someone can write a wrapper around the indian train schedule website
then, because it sucks.

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threepointone
I will gladly sponsor hosting these files, if someone can send a copy my way.

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QuarkSpark
This is a really awesome accomplishment. Keep going!

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denzil_correa
Good going! :-)

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Craiggybear
Error (509) This account's public links are generating too much traffic and
have been temporarily disabled!

:(

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kia
Suggestion: add archives in more Unix friendly format (xz, gz, bz2). Not
everyone has zip installed on their Unix box.

~~~
Sanddancer
Gzip and zip use the same compression format, and it's just a single file, so
you can use gunzip -S to uncompress this just fine.

