RailChecker Website Update

RailChecker Web (which will now be referred to as just RailChecker or the RailChecker website from here on) has had a significant facelift to coincide with the general release of the website to all users free of charge. Some locations of certain pages and menus have changed, hence this blog post detailing the changes.

Refreshed UI

The home page has been given a touch up, especially around the top of the page to reflect that you now don’t need to log in to access RailChecker – so a search field is now provided right on the landing page. The landing page also has a new animation going on in the background, you can think of it as trains arriving and departing.

The website runs on Bootstrap for its styling, and that has been updated to the latest version which provides some design improvements. This also means that some of the colours have changed.

Some pages have also been changed to look nicer (including page layouts for services – see below).

New Simple/Detailed modes

The simple mode has been simplified further, and the detailed mode is now more detailed. This should help with making RailChecker as accessible as possible to as many people as possible and provide as much detail as the user wants.

Simple mode reflects the popular and easy to use UI from the app, including the well regarded “traffic light” delay indicators and line diagrams. Detailed mode largely retains the style and layout from the pre-existing version of RailChecker Web, with some tweaks and improvements.

Journey Planner

Following the efficiency updates made a while back, it’s now possible to provide a journey planner on the RailChecker website. It doesn’t provide any additional functionality over what is available in the app.

Note: The journey planner is rate limited! Server capacity is finite and recently some users have recently been abusing the journey planning system – RailChecker uses it’s own journey planner, not NRE’s planning engine and as the RailChecker server is much smaller it can’t handle a stream of requests made one after another within a short space of time. Repeated attempts to overwhelm the server will result in action being taken in accordance with the terms of service.

Page changes

The following pages have changed:

• Home: now called Search
• Journey Planner: now called Planner
• Departures: revised layout, simple and detailed modes now separated into different pages, filtering options now persist when changing time parameters.

Other changes

• Dark mode now available – press the moon icon button in the top right corner (or in the menu option if on a smaller screen)
• More frequent use of CRS codes.
• Improved algorithm for autocomplete (e.g. if you enter “York” it will take you to York departures and not Bentley (South Yorkshire)).
• TIPLOC now shown where location description not available (previously showed “None”).
• Formations now shown as centred on the screen where it doesn’t overflow.
• Where no actual arrival/departure/pass time has been reported, “N/R” will show.
• The code connecting to and processing messages from the Knowledgebase Disruptions service has been updated to correctly delete cleared incidents.
• Website now uses new API.

A note about advertising

You may have noticed that there is no advertising on the RailChecker website. It was initially hoped that this would be sorted prior to launch, however unfortunately Adsense require that the website meets minimum levels of content quality – which can’t be done if the site is not open/free. Alternative providers have been explored but they are of very low quality and would not be appropriate for this website.

As a result, the decision has been taken to not show advertising on railchecker.app for the short term. This may come as a disappointment to some Pro users who may question the value of their subscription, however on mobile the RailChecker app is far superior when compared to the RailChecker website. The RailChecker app also has notifications for Pro users, and Pro users still have access to per-carriage crowding information on select Southeastern and Greater Anglia services (this exclusivity carries through to the website).

To others, it may be a relief – however servers are not free, and RailChecker takes up a lot of my time. As a result, as things stand the website does not have a long term future. It will survive in the short term though, and during this time options will be explored to ensure the long term sustainability of the website. Advertising will at some point be implemented – it’s a question of when, not if.

Future plans

The RailChecker website provides many opportunities for the development of features for both the app and the website. In particular, the following features are being looked at:

• Synced pinned stations, services and journeys across all logged in sessions.
• A customisable dashboard to present information that you want at a glance (to be featured on the Search page, which before this update was the Home page).
• More utilities: Things that maybe don’t have a place in the app but could be useful to a limited number of people – for example, timetables or analytics.
• Cross-integration with the RailChecker app, for example deep linking railchecker.app links to the RailChecker app.

There are also plans to radically overhaul the system holding service schedules to be able to improve the current 7 day data retention period to something far more useful.

Having said all of that though, as a third-year university student I will not have a lot of time to work on this in the coming months.