The Why? If you live near a level crossing or in a town dominated by them you will undoubtably have been in a situation where your in a hurry to get somewhere. Running out the door, no time to spare, usually with a child in toe with their sports bag for the activity their late for... leaving that extra chore you need to do till later because you need to leave now! Only to find 'The Crossing' is down. So you sit. pondering if you had known, you could have spent your time more productively!
My town of Oakham in the small county of Rutland, United kingdom. It sees over 70 trains a day with the barriers down for around 3.5 hours a day! Has few roads to avoid the traffic build up from the 2 level crossings. Perhaps if the residents of the town had a way to know when The crossing was 'down' we could avoid the hold ups? Avoid emergency vehicles being caught up in traffic? Have less people injured due to accidents where people are late and risk crossing the tracks when they shouldn't?
The Techy Bit
This is what I set out to achieve. I found out how railway data is published, how trains can be tracked along their routes but unfortunately that the data to know if the crossing barriers are engaged is not widely available. Therefore a more creative solution had to be found for the solution to scale.
I learned how to get the live train movement data, combine with the level crossing locations and inserted the crossings into the schedules to provide estimated arrival times at all UK level crossings.
The Front End
It would have to be un-intrusive, require no effort to engage with and surface the train times at the exact right moment to be useful.
These were my guiding principles.
- Allow a user to tell me when they wanted notifications to fit their schedule or routine, so as not to spam a user with every train arrival.
- Not collect any personal data.
- Allow the product to pay for itself so it could endure.
- be simple and easy to use, this was not an app just for people who like trains. It needs be be for everyone.
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