Whats my Train is back up and running.



We are also excited about a new feature NJ Transit has created. They now have a web-based departure board available for most stations. The two missing stations are New York Penn Station and Hoboken. Having a departure board available from NJTransit.com gives us interesting opportunities.
Example: Secaucus Junction



One problem we face daily is during our run to the train we always have to strain to find which track our train is on once we get to the NJT station. It would be much nicer if we knew beforehand! Well, once NJ Transit adds Penn station to it’s departure board service, we might be able to solve our problem. We could setup an agent that checks the online departure board, and sends us an SMS once the track has been posted! Imagine the time we could save knowing our track number before we even enter the station!



In the meantime, we’ll continue our daily ritual of pushing people out of the way so we can catch a glance for the track number…all the while daydreaming about what the future may bring.

I got To / From working for LIRR yesterday (I thought I was working on Metro North whoops). Good news is that Metro North is almost exact as LIRR site, once LIRR is up and running we should have Metro North available shortly after.


Ian is working on handling the input from SMS and translating to station codes. Feels good to be working on WMT again!

Working on adding Metro North to Whats My Train?



Much more difficult than NJTransit as we have to work with mta’s web form instead of sending an HTML request.



Difficult = more fun =)

2 more enhancements:

– By sending “Help” to hey@whatsmytrain.com, you will receive a short description of how to use all of WMT’s features



– Trip duration is now returned with trip times. Make sure you don’t miss that express train home! =)

We’ve added a new feature to WMT.



Train fare information on the go!



Send a message in the following format:

fares [origin] to [destination]

WMT will provide you with One Way and Round-Trip fares for your trip



Enjoy!

I just finished and enabled active monitoring. The website will now show if the whats my train application is running and accepting requests or not.

Alerts are now active on Whats My Train.



To get rail alerts send a message to hey@whatsmytrain.com using any of the following formats:

Alert [station-name]

Alerts [station-name]

Alert [origin name] to [destination name]

Alerts [origin name] to [destination name]



We are still ironing out how alerts display on the NJ Transit RSS feed, we fix any problems as we see them. If you have any problems please let us know.

We have updated the spell checking algorithm to accurately return best 3 matches.



Previously we would only suggest the best match and two other matches. While this was useful it wasn’t entirely helpful.



We have also setup the spell checker to check permutations of a station name

Example: “NYP”, “NY Penn Station”, etc.



Hopefully these improvements make Whats My Train more enjoyable to use!

Working on retrieving Alerts using NJ Transit Alert RSS.



Usage Examples:

Alerts NYP to Oradell – will return any active alerts on all lines used in this route

Alerts Oradell – will return any active alerts on this station’s line



We will have this active shortly. As it is now we are testing as alerts show up in the system, we do not know the concrete format of the alerts but have made our “best guess” as to how they will look.



NJ Transit’s RSS is poorly formatted, wish they had Line name as an XML tag but we can’t always get what we want 😛

We are now running on MS Visual Studio C# Express development environment with SQL Express 2008 backend DB. whoooo…. Now we can better keep track of what users search for to further improve our system.