Dixieland Time Accuracy

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battalion51

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I've noticed something over the past few months with the status maps where times are erroneously reported in the system. The case subject I'll use it 48-28. If you pull up the history on it, it presently shows that it arrived and departed from ALB at 2:41, which we all know is physically impossible (since it's where 448 splits, it picks up a new crew, and new motor). It's entirely possible that Amtrak.com did spit out those times at one point, however if you query it presently it shows the train in at 2:41 and out at 3:45. So my question is, would it be possible for the system to continue to query the system looking for updated times at the previous station until it clears the next scheduled station? In this case it would continue to query ALB until it has a time for POU, POU til it has a time for CRT, etc.
 
I've noticed something over the past few months with the status maps where times are erroneously reported in the system. The case subject I'll use it 48-28. If you pull up the history on it, it presently shows that it arrived and departed from ALB at 2:41, which we all know is physically impossible (since it's where 448 splits, it picks up a new crew, and new motor). It's entirely possible that Amtrak.com did spit out those times at one point, however if you query it presently it shows the train in at 2:41 and out at 3:45. So my question is, would it be possible for the system to continue to query the system looking for updated times at the previous station until it clears the next scheduled station? In this case it would continue to query ALB until it has a time for POU, POU til it has a time for CRT, etc.
It's possible, but not exactly as you suggest. The reason is that the times for a train are not published in a linear fashion (by Amtrak), from the origin station to the destination. They sometimes seem to get published in random order. Also, in this case, it wouldn't have worked because ALL of the times from Albany to NYC were off. It seems that someone must have discovered this at some point after the train's times were complete, and went back to fix them. I have deleted the erroneous times. The housekeeping function will come along early tomorrow morning and fill them in again - with Amtrak's current times.

Now then, to the general question - should the DixielandSoftware system continuously monitor the Amtrak system for corrections? In a word - no. The DixielandSoftware system has limited computing resources, and so does Amtrak for that matter. And there are also limited network resources sitting between the two. It's good to keep the times as accurate as possible, but I don't think it's critical.

I think the best way to get the times corrected is to simply report them to me within 5 days of the train's run. After that Amtrak removes the times from public access.

jb
 
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