We rely on data from trainsit networks, weather providers and other sources to populate our maps, it’s what keeps them lit up showing live data. Unfortunately these sources can have issues (TFL are currently experiencing a security incident and have frozen their live feeds), which in the worst case can leave our boards blank.
We’ve built a solution to this problem by letting you select alternate data, or data that we have previously recorded, to be displayed on your board in these times. For example, if you enable alternate data and there is an outage of the live data, we can show data from a previous week/month.
This is currently an experimental feature, and isn’t perfect. If we are replaying data from 2 weeks previously but had a gap in the data back then (either from a data source issue, or train engineering works, etc) that same gap will be displayed again now.
This feature can be enabled/disabled any time by visiting your traintrackr dashboard -> selecting your device -> clicking the ‘alternate data’ button.
You can check what data you are currently receiving on the device dashboard, looking for the status box, which will show one of these options.
- The board is displaying live data, and the data source is good.
- The board is displaying live data, but the live data has issues, so alternate data is available.
- The board is displaying alternate data because of the issues with the live data.
This feature is designed for anyone who would rather have their board lit up at these times, and doesn’t mind the data not always being live. We only show alternate data when our main data feed has issues, and will always show live data when we are receiving it, which is most of the time.