Route Timetable PDFs returning? (2021-2022)

[johnmiller]

Here is an archive of Amtrak Timetables I found. I am guessing a lot of you are aware, but just in case:

https://juckins.net/amtrak_timetables/archive/home.php

 

[jis]

There are a lot of other considerations. Figuring out which services should be presented on a single table, and arranging timetables like the Florida services to be most positively comprehensible, and attaching Thruway bus schedules to the right timetables, is not trivial and probably honestly can't be automated.

It can be done by one person in a few hours though.

Indeed! It is generating the templates for each page that requires manual intervention. Once the templates are done, if done right, then they can be auto populated from the timetable database, again if done right.

It can actually be a very significant effort to create human friendly templates showing things like Thruway connections, in a user friendly way. Doing just a mindless route dump is much easier, specially when the route has precisely one train

 

[PRR 60]

According to a report in the latest issue of Trains Magazine (December 2021), timetables will be returning with a target date of the end of 2021. The work is part of the "timetable automation project" that will produce downloadable and printable documents that will "replicate legacy route timetables" but will be populated with the stations, trains and times in that are in the Arrow CRS at the time of the request. The timetables will be dynamically generated and will include up-to-date connecting Thruway services.

 

[jis]

I doubt that the templates will be dynamically generated though. But populating from CRS is definitely the way to go. Someone has to create those stylesheets, or at least write a data driven stylesheet generator of some sort, for the thing to work and especially be user friendly though.

 

[me_little_me]

According to a report in the latest issue of Trains Magazine (December 2021), timetables will be returning with a target date of the end of 2021. The work is part of the "timetable automation project" that will produce downloadable and printable documents that will "replicate legacy route timetables" but will be populated with the stations, trains and times in that are in the Arrow CRS at the time of the request. The timetables will be dynamically generated and will include up-to-date connecting Thruway services.

But is this being done by Amtrak or by volunteers on this site? And, if by Amtrak, it's unfortunate that someone here didn't copyright it first!

 

[Tommydawg]

I also contacted Amtrak via email about 2 weeks ago and questioned them about the return of the printed Timetables. Personally I poured over them for planning purposes for connections to other trains, dining cars, car rentals, hotels, station facilities & parking, etc. They seem to have the mistaken belief that *everyone* knows exactly where they are boarding and where their destination ends, and have no need to know anything else whatsoever.

Here is the reply they sent me 2 weeks ago:

Dear [me], Thank you for contacting us. We are in the process of automating timetables and have discontinued traditional PDF timetables. We apologize for any inconvenience while the new solution is being implemented. In the meantime, you can view our schedules on Amtrak.com through the “Schedules” tab. Simply enter in your Origin and Destination and click the “Find Schedules” button. Please call 1-800-USA-RAIL (1-800-872-7245), 24/7, should you need assistance. Press '0' to speak with an Amtrak reservations agent. We look forward to serving you aboard Amtrak. Sincerely, Amtrak

 

[neroden]

Again, keep complaining, preferably to the Board and CEO of Amtrak, whose paper-mail addresses are on the website. We have people inside Amtrak who agree with us; it's a matter of getting enough advocates yelling at top management to get the problem fixed.

 

[AmtrakBlue]

They have "fixed" the Print Selected Train. It will now print out all stops and information. Unfortunately, it still requires you to select a start and end point and date.

 

[John from RI]

It is February 14, 2022 and there are no time tables. Railroads have offered time tables since early in the 19th century. The New Haven Railroad in its worst days still had time tables. It is hard to believe Amtrak is so incompetent. I wish it were not so.

 

[joelkfla]

They have "fixed" the Print Selected Train. It will now print out all stops and information. Unfortunately, it still requires you to select a start and end point and date.

Hah! I didn't even know this existed.

First, I've never seen that weird window pane icon for the menu anywhere else; it's usually the hamburger icon for menus. And they stick it next to the date --- why?

So after I realized it was there, I click it and all I see is "Selected Train". The word "Print" is cut off on MS Edge on my Windows laptop! If I hadn't seen your post, I would never have thought to click on it.

Nice web design, Amtrak!

ETA: BTW, for the Silver Star, the printout says "Freq: Sa" instead of Daily or listing all 7 days. It doesn't matter which date you select, it always says "Freq: Sa".

 

[neroden]

It is February 14, 2022 and there are no time tables. Railroads have offered time tables since early in the 19th century. The New Haven Railroad in its worst days still had time tables. It is hard to believe Amtrak is so incompetent. I wish it were not so.

Amtrak definitely has the least competent railroad mangement in history. I could do better, working half-time. I have never seen anything this incompetent before. I don't blame middle management: this lies directly at the feet of notorious incompetent Stephen Gardner. I think he actually does support passenger trains -- but he's just manifestly unqualified to make ANY management decisions about them. This proves it.

 

[lrh442]

Eight months after my original post the probability of the return of Amtrak-produced printable pdf-style timetables is growing ever more remote. So, I ask the IT-savvy members here: As jis mused, do you think some kind of crowd-sourced creation and maintenance of timetables is feasible or not-so-much?

So one possibility is we can create a team of volunteers here at AU where each individual can take on one train and create upto date timetable by editing the standard Amtrak template for that route. Single trains are easy to handle this way. Nultiple trains get more and more complex depending on the number of trains in a table.

 

[jis]

Eight months after my original post the probability of the return of Amtrak-produced printable pdf-style timetables is growing ever more remote. So, I ask the IT-savvy members here: As jis mused, do you think some kind of crowd-sourced creation and maintenance of timetables is feasible or not-so-much?

AFAIK @neroden I think has a back burner project that he has been working on "as and when he canly" Maybe he can give an update when something significant has happened.

 

[neroden]

That is correct. Lot of other stuff going on so I haven't made progress in a couple of weeks. (More medical problems to deal with for my partner, and that's not easy with the pandemic still raging, since she *got infected at a medical office* in December, so we're being ultra-paranoid -- getting the fourth dose, going off the immune suppressants, scheduling the appointments about 2 weeks after dose #4, wearing even better-fitting N95s than she wore last time...)

I'd say I'm three to five full days' work away from having a program which produces a pretty nice HTML timetable from GTFS data (looking similar to the ones from the classic timetable); it uses a little manual intervention in the form of templates (which can be prepped in a spreadsheet program as CSV) for the more complicated timetables ( while the templates can be autogenerated for the simple cases). I am quite sure I've got the architecture right so that I can generate nearly all the different styles of timetables which were used in prior Amtrak timetables. A few persnickety items will take longer.

The same program should be able to put it out in a raw CSV format if people want to present it differently, and the HTML should be suitable to feed through an HTML-to-PDF translater. If I get it finished I'll put it at the service of Rail Passengers Assocation and we should be able to pump out a full set of timetables with a script.

Manual work updating the applicable template would be required when train service actually changes significantly (new train numbers, cancelled train numbers, stations added or removed), but should be on the order of one minute's work -- and we all know that sort of change doesn't happen that often.

Changes in exactly when trains arrive should just be a matter of running "make new timetable", push a button, get a timetable. The heavy manual effort which was error-prone was copying the times into the spreadsheet, and I have it from inside Amtrak that they did not like the fact that occasionally copying errors crept in. So I figured I'd solve that problem.

I still need Amtrak to release up-to-date GTFS data to one of the standard sites like openmobilitydata, but I'm hearing that that is likely soon.

The program's in a "pieces lying on the floor" state at the moment, because I've gone through three rounds of prototypes in order to get the architecture right, and now I have to port the detail code from the first two prototypes to the third architecture, but that's pretty cut-and-dried work. The first prototype was producing a pretty nice timetable for the Cardinal but I needed to re-architect to do some of the other timetables.

 

[TinCan782]

OK, gave it a shot for the Coast Starlight...just the basic timetable info. No connection, services info.
The foundation data is here:
Train #11: Train Details
and here Train #14 Train Details
This can be done for any train.

Copied and pasted all of this into an Excel spreadsheet, deleted unwanted data and massaged away! I've been doing this for myself for upcoming trips for a while now. I just print the spreadsheet and keep it with my travel stuff for the trip.

For this example, I saved it as a PDF to upload here.
I'm not ready to make an Amtrak-looking timetable!

 

[neroden]

That's pretty elegant. Not sure I could make one quite as pretty (the "Day 1"/"Day 2" thing is not something I'm implementing) but I should be able to replicate most of the rest of that with my program and a suitable template.

I don't have a machine-readable source of milepost numbers though, not so far anyway.

 

[neroden]

So one of the things I heard from inside Amtrak after applying a lot of pressure was that they didn't like the problems related to manual copying of timetable data or data going stale (apparently small errors in publication had created some large problems in the past). Of course, Amtrak management has made that problem ten times worse now that there are dozens of fan timetables which may have copying errors, which is not very bright of them.

So I figured, "This, I can fix." Timetable design is an art (hence the need for templates), but plugging in the times should be mechanical and automated. My template format for a simple timetable like the Coast Starlight one would be a one-line file looking something like this:

stations of 11, 11, station names, 14

You also have to specify a key date to extract the times from GTFS which are valid on that date; and then the whole timetable would print out.

A more complex timetable like Carolinas Service would require that the list of all the stations to be included in the timetable be specified in the template, including the order; there's no way to autogenerate it, as it is an artistic decision, it turns out.

The template for the old Cascades southbound weekday schedule without buses might look like this:

,station names,503,501,11,513,507,509,517
vac,,,,,,,
bel,,,,,,,
mvw,,,,,,,
stw,,,,,,,
evr,,,,,,,
sea,,,,,,,
tac,,,,,,,
olw,,,,,,,
ctl,,,,,,,
kel,,,,,,,
van,,,,,,,
pdx,,,,,,,
slm,,,,,,,
aly,,,,,,,
eug,,,,,,,
,,,,To Los Angeles,,,

So basically, column IDs and row IDs, plus special legends like "To Los Angeles", and the program fills in the rest. I think I've got a pretty flexible design now.

Oh, and although I'm setting it up to produce a styled HTML table, it can also just produce CSV for people who want to restyle it themselves to add extra cool bits like that "Day 1 Day 2" thing.

 

[denmarks]

Years ago I did the reverse of creating a timetable. I manually took all of the data from the current timetables and created an HTML table that was loaded from a data file. I had the ability to enter a route number and see all the stops in forward or reverse order. I also had the ability to enter a station to see all the trains stopping there. It was over 10 years ago and I no longer have a website or the actual code. If I could do it I am sure a single programmer could maintain timetables. All the data is currently available online and just needs to be extracted and formatted.

There are currently websites that show train status and the complete schedule for each one. Has any of them tried to extract and combine all the data into a schedule format?
Example: Amtrak Status Maps

 

[Cal]

There are currently websites that show train status and the complete schedule for each one. Has any of them tried to extract and combine all the data into a schedule format?

Amtrak/VIA Live Map Already does that, if you click a train and then click at the top left the train name and the date it left (Example below, top left is where you would click)

 

[TinCan782]

Amtrak/VIA Live Map Already does that, if you click a train and then click at the top left the train name and the date it left (Example below, top left is where you would click) View attachment 27218

See my post #290 above and the attachment which was derived from this site.

 

[Willbridge]

OK, gave it a shot for the Coast Starlight...just the basic timetable info. No connection, services info.
The foundation data is here:
Train #11: Train Details
and here Train #14 Train Details
This can be done for any train.

Copied and pasted all of this into an Excel spreadsheet, deleted unwanted data and massaged away! I've been doing this for myself for upcoming trips for a while now. I just print the spreadsheet and keep it with my travel stuff for the trip.

For this example, I saved it as a PDF to upload here.
I'm not ready to make an Amtrak-looking timetable!

Handsome looking (the output, I mean)! I like having the city codes presented. There is one quirk northbound at SJC for the arrive and depart.

 

[TinCan782]

Handsome looking (the output, I mean)! I like having the city codes presented. There is one quirk northbound at SJC for the arrive and depart.

Thanks Missed that when I was inverting the columns for northbound (the original read top to bottom like southbound).
Easy fix.

 

[Willbridge]

Wow! I remember all this effort in the 1990's with hobbyists developing timetables and search software. I believe that was the origin of HAFAS (now owned by Siemens as HACON). Somewhere I probably have a CD of the DB Amtliches Kursbuch.

DB Netz - strecken.info (hafas.de)

 

[Joe from PA]

Timetables are handy for reasons not yet mentioned. Since we are "senior citizens", probably not important to many of you. One, in coach on the way to Boston: "Dear, would you like to have lunch at 11:45 or 12:20?". This to give me and easier time walking while trying to carry stuff trough 2 cars from the cafe car. Or, guys, "Next stand-up pee stop coming up in 12 minutes".

 

[neroden]

I don't really want to be insulting, but I will be -- Amtrak's current IT department is not currently competent to prepare timetable generating software.

I'm basically doing it because I'm competent, it's a fun project, and they're unlikely to get it done either promptly or well -- they were supposed to get it done *before* retiring the person who prepared the timetables manually, they didn't, which shows that they weren't competent. :sigh: I hope they get better people employed at some point.