Monthly Archives: May 2009

Service Interuptions

Lately the Server that hosts Whats my train has been plagued with some hardware failure. The service has been up and down lately and we are sorry to those of you who have been getting spammed when it comes back online.

 Things are looking better now and the service should remain operating as planned.

Enhancements: Help / Trip Duration

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! =)

New Feature: Fares

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!

Fixed: Alerts

Two problems we found and fixed with Alerts:




  1. Alerts feature was not accepting station names that contain more than one word (which is quite a few!)

  2. NJTransit Alerts RSS sometimes contains multiple lines in the alert text. We have updated the application to find each line name listed in the alert and match it with the inputted station(s).

System is back up and running.

Well we learned the hard way that parsing messages correctly is hard when it is coming in different formats. As we make the BETA public, the messages that we recieve have had unexpected formats. We think we have addressed this for now and the system is now cooking again.