Sydney Trains real-time feed upgrade - 24/09

Real-time Public Transport
1

The Sydney Trains real-time feed was upgraded at midnight on September 24th. The upgrade will have the following impact:

  • Before the upgrade all trip_ids in the trains bundle would change everyday when it was published, meaning if users do not download the bundle daily there will be zero matches with the real-time feed. Now trip_ids will remain the same where there is no material change to the trip. Note that Sydney Trains still make some daily updates for operational running, so users are recommended to update the bundle frequently to match 100% of trips. If you no not update every day, at least now it won’t completely break the link with real-time, as the majority of trip will match.

  • Splitting the North Shore and Western lines into individual routes in the data to minimise confusion.

If you have any further questions please let us know.

Thanks.
Alex

1 Like
2

Hey @alejandro.felman

Since trip_ids are unchanged between days, it would be tremendously useful if start_date is provided in the GTFS-realtime feed (linked to the GTFS schedule for realtime).

Currently, it appears the start_date field is unfilled:

{
"id" : "111H.1476.105.12.T.8.43659193",
"is_deleted" : false,
"trip_update" : {
    "trip" : {
        "trip_id" : "111H.1476.105.12.T.8.43659193",
        "route_id" : "WL_1a",
        "start_time" : null,
        "start_date" : null,
        "schedule_relationship" : "SCHEDULED"
    },
    "vehicle" : null,
    "stop_time_update" : [ 
        {
            "stop_sequence" : null,
            "stop_id" : "2000338",
            "arrival" : {
                "delay" : 0,
                "time" : null,
                "uncertainty" : null
            },
            "departure" : {
                "delay" : 0,
                "time" : null,
                "uncertainty" : null
            },
            "schedule_relationship" : "SCHEDULED"
        },  [...]
}

The problem I’m facing right now is correctly attributing a trip update coming in through the realtime feed to the correct date since some trips either begin or end after midnight of the day (i.e. has a stop time value of >24 hours).

Thanks!