Hi Cotzo. I also am pretty impressed. However, I was just wondering what the final purpose of the site was going to be? Business-wise? Or did someone just commission you to create it as an add-on service.

The client I've build this for has some meetings these days with SBB, imagine only that you can add a map-frame to the main website of the sbb.ch, the visual impact is big to front-end. However I am just the programmer, I don't know the exact purpose of it so let it pass the BETA phase.

Cotzo, thanks for the useful information. What kind of data is used for the application? Is it just regular (i.e. static) timetable data or do you have access to real time data?

Your question was answered in the original post:

Mark : just data from timetables, also it's a experiment with delay data from prosurf. Even with those the position of the trains are computing by considering the trains are running with constant speed between A and B

However, my client is now talking with SBB about a real-position (GPS-like) train data feed.

I'm sure this was discussed before but can't find the thread (a search on the url gives 4 results, none of which match the url)

Anyway, the site -> www.swisstrains.ch

It's fun to watch but anyone know how accurate it is?

fairly good in my experience. That is times at stations are usually spot on. Moving trains in between may be extrapolated sometimes.

So it's just a visual representation of the timetable rather than real-time?

No, it's definitely real time. So times at stations are dead on, but times in between not always as SBB can only trace the position of their trains to the relevant signal blocks but not within those blocks, so if a train stops or slows unexpectedly the representation will keep moving a bit longer, until that train fails to enter the next block at the expected time.

@amogles, Sorry to disappoint you but that's a simulation of the Swiss railway network. The trains are running according with the SBB timetables and their positions are result of interpolation (because the polylines coordinates and the start/end time between stations are known)

The timetable data is not updated since 2009. But an update will come soon(TM).