UK Departure Boards are now capable of displaying Freight & Empty Coaching Stock services! We have been working on this feature for quite a while now and have put a great deal of time and effort into it.
You can either mix the freight / ECS into your usual station services (via the ‘National’ tab) Or if you want to really narrow down to a specific junction / siding or depot you can use the new ‘Junctions & Depots’ tab.
The services can be enabled via the new ‘Show Freight’ & ‘Show ECS’ toggle options. There are some extra options for showing delayed / cancelled freight / ECS as well.
One note about freight and ECS is they don’t quite behave like normal passenger services and usually don’t fully abide by their schedules which creates a few departure estimate problems. We have done our best to make the expected departure times as accurate as possible but sometimes they might be out if the service does something unexpected we cant detect. A lot of the services will activate but never actually leave, or leave very late. We do show these, but will hide them after 30min of non movement from there origin and show them again if they do eventually depart. We also display any service over 3 hours late as ‘Delayed’ (these can be hidden by a toggle option)
- The freight / ESC data is only available to Premium Subscribers, you can sign up here.
- We feel the system is 95% there and we are still tweaking it to be even more perfect, but if you do see something not quite right or any missing services please reach out to us with some details on the offending service.
- We will be adding some extra features soon like ‘Arrived’ & ‘Approaching’ statuses and continue to fix any bugs we find as well as improve departure estimates.
- We are also looking into a better system for formatting some of the crazy long locations names.
Everyone at UKDB has worked really hard on this new feature, we hope you enjoy it and hope it adds some extra value to your UK Departure Board. Any questions or feedback please email us at [email protected] (all feedback is welcome!)
Special thanks to Christian, Phil & Mark for coding & testing the system! And Andy for the fantastic freight photos!