It would be nice to have a machine readable copy of the UK National rail timetable. Network rail supply a timetable in PDF format. It is possible to extract machine readable timetable data from this PDF.

Requirements

• pdftops: Portable Document Format (PDF) to PostScript converter. Ships as part of Poppler (GPL 2)

  To install on Debian or Ubuntu run: apt-get install poppler-utils

• CompleteTimetable.pdf: Download the time table PDF from Network Rail (60M)

• Perl: Also need the modules Data::Dump and List::MoreUtils.

  On Debian or Ubuntu run: apt-get install libdata-dump-perl liblist-moreutils-perl

• Rail timetable parser: Download parser

Usage

Put CompleteTimetable.pdf in a directory with parse. Run parse: perl parse The first time it is run it will call pdftops to convert the PDF, a binary format, into PostScript, a text format, which is easy to work with.

Then it will print lots of debugging output about pages, timetables and trains.

Output

Here is an sample of output in a range of formats:

• XML
• YAML
• JSON
• Perl data structure

Further work

This code is unfinished, lots of cases are not handled. Specifically:

• Base notes
• Head notes
• Date ranges
• Train flags
• Trains that join or split
• Repeat trains: "and at the same minutes past each hour until"