Australia Train Tracker

[paul@skegby.org.]

Like the UK, is there a train tracker like Realtraintimes in Australia?

 

[Groningen]

The best i can think of is this, but it has no interactive thing going.

http://www.railmaps.com.au/index.html

 

[yorkie]

A quick search suggests rail data doesn't appear to be open in Australia, so it doesn't look like similar sites can be created...

 

[Groningen]

With only 1 or 2 train a day or even 1, 2 or 3 times in a week Australia can not be compared with any other country in the developed world.

 

[tranzitjim]

The Melbourne tram system has a tram tracker.

I have not used it, nor seen it myself, but I read quite a lot about it in the Australian train buff forums. Said to be very good in respect to tracking any of the Melbourne trams.

 

[DownSouth]

With only 1 or 2 train a day or even 1, 2 or 3 times in a week Australia can not be compared with any other country in the developed world.

Actually, you might find that the practices used on remote branch lines in Australia were copied from the hundreds of shortline railroads in operation all over North America - specifically from the Canadian Pacific.

Had shortline practices not been adopted, the lines would have closed and the freight traffic lost to the roads - this is a pure fact, because it did actually happen in Britain through the 1960s.


The interstate mainlines of the national network see a train go through every couple of hours, with many being 1800 metre long double-stack intermodal trains - just like the mainlines in the USA. If these trains were operated using British practices (short 400-500 metre trains, single stack containers only) they would need to run about every 20 minutes, necessitating the construction of a second track instead of the more economically maintained single track route with passing loops.

 

[ian959]

With only 1 or 2 train a day or even 1, 2 or 3 times in a week Australia can not be compared with any other country in the developed world.

Must remember that when I am sitting at somewhere like Kalgoorlie or Broken Hill watching the super-freighters and occasional passenger train passing by - maybe 6 to 8 in a period of 2 hours at some times of the day and week.

 

[LesS]

In NSW there are a couple of telephone apps available to show the location and timing of the trains nearest your location. They are free. Special programs were written for Sydney Trains to provide these apps.

There is a website which will show all of the trains on the national standard gauge network. It is not publicly available and is password protected. It works on the basis of GPS positioning and a dedicated GMS telephone network. All locomotives using these lines must have the appropriate telephone and GPS equipment installed before they will be authorised to operate.

Sadly for visitors (and us) there is no publicly available source to indicate the position of trains. We have to depend on the timetables.