Open Data for public-transport visualisation

A set of open data and other resources that could be used to produce transport and related visualisations.

Base Rail data

These base data consist of the centre-line or network track-model, Network Rail location codes, plus the CIF format timetable and VSTP updates.

Product Note Owner Licence
Track Model Railway network model Shapefile with link, node, reference lines and waymark layers. See Open Data Technical Specification. Network Rail Open (OGL3)
CORPUS Lookup codes for rail stations from the CORPUS system (Codes for Operations, Retail & Planning – a Unified Solution). See OpenRailData wiki Network Rail Open (OGL3)
Schedule Daily train schedule extract and updates from the national Integrated Train Planning System in Common InterFace (CIF) format. See OpenRailData wiki Network Rail Open (OGL3)
Very Short-Term Planning (VSTP) Real-time train schedules created via the Very Short Term Plan (VSTP) process. See OpenRailData wiki Network Rail Open (OGL3)

Key Station and Public Transport Data

These data are the National Passenger Transport Access Node (NaPTAN) and Transport Gazette for Great Britain.

Product Note Owner Licence
NaPTAN & NPTG This CSV and XML API contains information for all passenger transport nodes including rail, bus-stops, ferry terminals and airports. PDF user guide Department for Transport (DfT) Open (OGL3)
Station attributes for all mainline stations in GB Table 6329: Station attributes for all mainline stations, Great Britain as ODS file. Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Open (OGL3)
Stations Reference Data Geographic station names output from journey planning in XML format file. Rail Development Group (RDG) Open
Knowledgebase Stations data feed A station data-feed which includes information on train stations in XML format API. Rail Development Group (RDG) Open

Office of Road and Rail Orign and Destination (ODM) data

These are the base Origin and Destination Matrix (ODM) data showing journeys between all pairs of mainline stations in Great Britain used in ODM visualisations.

Product Note Owner Licence
Origin Destination Matrix 2018-19 Origin and destination matrix (ODM) financial year 2018-19 Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Open (OGL3)
Origin Destination Matrix 2019-20 Origin and destination matrix (ODM) financial year 2019-20 Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Open (OGL3)
Origin Destination Matrix 2020-21 Origin and destination matrix (ODM) financial year 2020-21 Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Open (OGL3)
Origin Destination Matrix 2021-22 Origin and destination matrix (ODM) financial year 2021-22 Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Open (OGL3)
Origin Destination Matrix 2022-23 Origin and destination matrix (ODM) financial year 2022-23 Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Open (OGL3)
Origin Destination Matrix 2023-24 Origin and destination matrix (ODM) financial year 2023-24 Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Open (OGL3)

Additional Network Rail Data

Product Note Owner Licence
Daily Footfall Count in and out of the concourse area of Network Rail managed rail stations as CSV. Network Rail Open (OGL3)
SRAM Passenger Flow Strategic Rail Analysis Model (SRAM)for Great Britain uses infrastructure, timetable and public transport schedules to model rail passenger. See Passenger Load documentation. Network Rail Open (OGL3)
Track Gradient R&D Track Gradient uses LiDAR to automatically generate track-level gradient data. Network Rail Open (OGL3)
Workforce Headcount Network Rail headcount by functions for each period of the financial year. Network Rail Open (OGL3)

Reference

Resources and reference material used for talks and visualisations

Base Geography and Population Data

  1. The base map of mainland Britain and other European countries are derived from the WorldPop base maps under CC 4.0 by deed retrieved 2023-09-07.
  2. EU Global Human Settlement layer, data licensed under creative commons 4.0
  3. OpenStreetMap, data licensed under Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0
  4. Access to OpenStreetMap through the OverPassAPI Turbo service.

Other Resources

Code packages, libraries, fonts and other resources

  1. International Klein Blue (#002FA7)
  2. Description and download for Rail Alphabet,
  3. “London Underground Tube” by SPSmiler
  4. Homer, Iliad, Perseus Digital Library, accessed 4 May 2022
  5. Transport Statistics Department for Transport
  6. Department for Business, Energy & Industry Strategy
  7. Open Rail Data wiki
  8. Rail Development Group, “Concept of Operations – Stock and Crew System (RDG-CONOPS/NTI/002)”, Issue 1.1, January 2021
  9. National Electronic Sectional Appendix (NESA)
  10. Extract NESA table data
  11. Department for Transport Energy and environment: data tables (ENV0201)
  12. python language, licensed under PSF for python 3
  13. Pandas, licensed under BSD 3-clause license
  14. GeoPandas, licensed under BSD 3-clause license
  15. Department for Transport (DfT) “Great British Railways: Williams-Shapps plan for rail”
  16. UK Electrification map
  17. Railway Industry Association “Why Rail Electrification”, 2021
  18. European Agency for Railways (ERA) “Fostering Rail Through Green Deal – part 2 Freight”, 2021
  19. RailNet Europe, “Timetabling and Capacity Redesign (TTR)”, 2022
  20. Network Rail, “Rail freight forecasts Scenarios for 2033-34 and 2043-44”, 2016
  21. Shapely python package for the manipulation and analysis of planar geometric objects, licensed under BSD 3-clause license
  22. Python Rasterio package for reading raster datasets, under the Rasterio license
  23. Python Tobler interpolation and mapping package, under BSD 3-clause license
  24. QGIS, a Geographic Information System (GIS), licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license
  25. OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 65, 126-139. Boeing, G. 2017.
  26. Uber H3 Uber python hexagon library, licensed under the Apache license 2.0
  27. National Rail Enquires (NRE) Transport Fixed Links with additional fixed links between Zone1/DLR locations to help origin and destination journey planning