The simple answer to your question is you can't. TOPS is an industry internal system accessible only to those staff who need it. While we live in an era of increasingly open data the information you are looking for can't really be said to have any significant weight of public interest needing it to be opened up.
If you work for a train company, you will have access to the tools you need to do your job. They won't give you TOPS access unless you need it for your role.
They're asking me to get freight train wagons length and order number but I don't have access to TOPS. And so right now I'm clueless of what to do next. The company I work for is not an operator company but a train parts company so maybe that's why they don't have access to TOPS.
A "train parts" company would already know the information you need, or would be able to obtain it from their business partners.
You may not be aware that most freight operators can fairly easily track their trains thought their own and NR systems hence possibly don't feel the need to be that helpful to 3rd cargo party trackings/monitoring (e.g. for containers) if there is no direct commercial relationship?
We often deal with live breakdown cases, so historical consist data isn’t useful for what we’re doing - which is why we were looking into TOPS access. Even though we have a commercial relationship with the freight operator, they unfortunately can’t provide the consist data live, which is the main limitation we’re trying to solve. This is a new project, and I don’t think anyone on our side currently has TOPS access, so we’ll try reaching out to Network Rail. Thanks for the help!
