[iRail] GTFS feed for NMBS/SNCB: working on an updated publishing strategy

Wed Jul 27 09:27:47 UTC 2016

Hi all,

We are updating the frequency in which we publish our GTFS feeds and are 
running the first tests, as we noticed that scraping once a year is not 
enough: small updates happen throughout the year.

What's going to happen now:

At the end of the month (28th-29th), we're now going to scrape a new 
GTFS file for the month itself and the following 3months. Each month 
we're going to publish a new version with a filename that looks like 
this: http://gtfs.irail.be/nmbs/nmbs-{year}-{month}.zip. When we are 
confident that these new feeds (which are not too much different than 
the current 2016 feed) are stable, we're going to adapt the 
nmbs-latest.zip link to the last zip file we scraped and also update our 
GTFS-RT.

What can you do for us:

  * Does this process work for you? Should we have a smaller or bigger 
overlapping time interval?
  * Give us feedback on the GTFS dump we generated yesterday: 
http://gtfs.irail.be/nmbs/nmbs-2016-07.zip. What are we doing right, 
what are we doing wrong? Please provide us with feedback on this 
repository using github over here: 
https://github.com/iRail/brail2gtfs/issues (there are already some 
issues open which we will fix soon, and some which have lower priority 
for the time being).

Kind regards,

Pieter