Thanks to Annie Mole’s London Underground blog, I’ve just spotted that Matthew Somerville and friends have used the recently opened up Transport for London API to create an (almost) real time map of all the trains on the London Underground.  The picture above is a horribly fuzzy screen capture from the real-time map. OK so the application it still needs some refinement – as Matthew says there are “some unresolved (a small number of stations are misplaced or missing; inter-station journey times need improvement; occasional trains behave oddly due to duplicate IDs)”.  This latter comment is indeed true as I was amused to see a District Line train hacking across country between Wimbledon and Richmond!

As a proof of concept – no, it’s better than that! – this brilliantly shows what can be done by skilled programmers in just a few hours.  In my book it is already a useful resource for Londoners, and has the potential to become much, much more especially if the DLR and London Overground data is accessible and they can be included.  Let’s hope Matthew and Co are able to continue developing the application.

Now what we need is a complete real-time map of all trains on the rail network – Matthew already has some prototype segments working.  Now that would be interesting.