README

bjh21/cifhack
=============

This is a wobbly pile of Perl scripts for manipulating the main-line
train timetable of Great Britain.  It is very unpolished, but might be
of some use.

loading data
------------

To do anything useful, you'll need some timetable data.  This can be
downloaded from <http://data.atoc.org>.  The distribution zip file
contains a bunch of files of which the largest is named *.mca and
contains the timetable.  Run "./cifload *.mca" to load this into a
SQLite database.

diagrams
--------

Possibly the most interesting script here is "diagram", which draws
space/time diagrams of timetables.  This takes a YAML configuration
file as input, which might look like this:

date: ["2014-09-12 08:00", "2014-09-12 18:00"]
tiplocs:
 - CBG: { label: Cambridge }
 - FOXTON:  { label: Foxton }
 - SHPRTH:  { label: Shepreth }
 - MELDRTH: { label: Meldreth }
 - ROYSTON: { label: Royston }
 - ASHWELC: { label: Ashwell & Morden }
 - BALDOCK: { label: Baldock }
 - LTCE:    { label: Letchworth }
 - HITCHIN: { label: Hitchin }

You can use either 3-alpha codes or TIPLOCs, and you can leave out the
labels like this:

date: ["2014-09-12 08:00", "2014-09-12 18:00"]
tiplocs:
 - CBG
 - FXN

Pass the name of the configuration file on the command line of
"diagram" and it will spit out some poorly-formatted PostScript on
stdout.  Colouring can be customised by editing the script (look for
$style).