So, we're coming to the end of our last talk for today.
I'm very happy that we are closing with a real training
operation.
And in this case, we're talking about how to do that with
open source, how the source can help there.
And yeah, Niels, it's your stage.
Yeah, thank you.
So my name is Niels.
During the week, I try to make medical devices speak
together.
And on the weekend, I'm playing with trains.
So I'm working at Dampfbahn Frankische Schweiz on the
weekends, which you can't see because it's too bright on the
beamer.
For location, this is Feuchheim, which some people might
know in the medical industry, because that's where my
employer is.
And the next bigger city is Nuremberg, which is somewhere
around here.
We have a short line, 16 kilometers.
It was closed down in 74.
We are running it since 80-something.
There's something like 30,000 passengers per year.
So we are slightly sized for a heritage line or museum
ray-ray.
We have 400 members in the club, of which 40 are actually
active.
We are running steam and diesel every Sunday from May to
October, sometimes occasionally holiday train or
special train, or whatever.
But May to October is the main time.
We are completely volunteer run.
So we have a professional safety manager, but everything
else is completely volunteers.
We are a real railway running under FONE regulations, so
slightly easier rules than the Deutsche Bahn has, but still
real railway rules.
And because we are kind of the only railway in the region, a
lot of local initiatives are in contact with us.
There are some initiatives we want to reopen public transport
on the line, which for us would be good, because then we
can get a lot of Trassengebühr.
And it would also help the area quite a lot.
So why do I do the talk here?
So first, I want to put heritage lines generally on the
radar for you guys, A, to come and visit us, and B, because
we have a lot of need for people doing IT stuff.
And the interesting thing is, as we are running some of the
heritage lines, have their own line, where we can do more
or less whatever we want and what the E-Bahn allows in
Germany.
We are the perfect experimentation ground, if you
want to try out some stuff.
If you look at Europe, we have about 100 heritage lines in
Germany.
UK is the absolute mecca.
They have, I don't know, far above 100.
They are about 50 in Austria, 20 in France, 10 in Belgium.
So all over Europe, you will find some lines.
They are organized in larger communities.
In Germany, it's the Faudi MT.
In Austria, the EMT.
UK has the Heritage Railway Association, the HRA.
So there's a bigger group, and there's a European
organization called Fedeg Rail.
What's our problem?
We like trains, but we are horribly bad at computers.
So this is kind of the typical members.
So that's me after a training shift as a fireman.
This is our engineer who is in real life a state attorney,
and this was my trainer for firemen.
He is in real life a medical doctor.
So I'm the only one who has to do something with IT in this
picture, and I'm probably the one of three in the whole
club who has to do something with IT.
So big problem if we want to run anything in IT.
What do we do?
Of course, we do the stuff that a normal railway does.
So we sell tickets.
We run trains.
We operate and repair the infrastructure.
So we have switches and signals and things.
We operate and repair rolling stock.
So we have coaches and wagons and locomotives and everything.
Not the usual stuff the Deutsche Bahn has to take care of.
There's a little overlap.
We have a V60, which I think is still in operations at
Deutsche Bahn as well.
But most of the stuff is 80 to 100 years old.
And we have workshops and sheds and all the infrastructure
around.
You need to have a railway running.
But also we have a nonprofit part of things.
So we have archives.
We do this to preserve history.
So we have a lot of documentation on our trains.
We have photography, everything on the historic side of
things.
We are a club, a fein in the city of Germany.
So we have to do membership management.
We have to do all the tech stuff you need to do for fein.
And we need to get somehow money for everything.
So we need to organize donation campaigns and try to get
fundings for things.
And it's not just the, so we cannot just run on tickets alone.
If you need to do a full inspection of a steam engine,
we are talking about half a million of euros.
And that is about 10 years of running.
And we need to do every 10 years this inspection.
So, and we have four steam engines.
So you see the problem.
OK, we still run railways as in the 1950s.
So our line, in our case, closed down 74.
It's more or less in the same state.
We are now, but the rest, the signalling,
everything is still in like in 74.
Our active members, unfortunately, are getting older.
We get newer active members again.
But unfortunately, the everyday workload on people has
also increased.
So you cannot spend all your life at the railway anymore.
Some people need to earn money.
And this is kind of increasing, decreasing the time that
people can spend on the railway.
They are higher safety requirements.
So even if we run railways like in the 50s,
we still have to fulfill all the safety requirements
from the 2020s.
So this is kind of challenging.
Our customers want more.
So you cannot come and say, yes, the ticket office is open
from 8 till 9 on Saturdays.
They want to buy a ticket on the internet.
And of course, growing regulations and administrative
effort, which you have everywhere.
So the problems we have, tickets, we still sell these
Edmondson tickets.
As you can see there, there's carport things.
And one of our members also has a printing machine for that.
So this problem is solved.
But we also want to sell tickets via the internet.
And there's not really a good solution.
There's Farkapendrucker.de in Germany, which works.
And works reliably.
But this thing is stuck in the 90s.
So if you look at the layout, it doesn't have responsive
design.
And it's really hard to use.
The back end is quite OK, but the front end for the customers
is horrible.
Unfortunately, it's the only thing we have.
The other thing is you could use some kind of an event
ticketing software.
So a lot of people here would probably know Pre-Tex.
Pre-Tex is absolutely great, but not made for railways.
So it starts with seating arrangements.
So usually we want to have some algorithm that not everybody
sits at the windows, but that if you book multiple places,
you have to set the window.
And then you fill up until you only then are allowed to have
the next window, because else you have all the windows taken.
And then the rest will stay empty because people say,
I want a window.
I don't go there.
There are hundreds of bachelors and master thesis on how to do
a ticket selling system.
But none of them has made it into an open source software,
unfortunately.
So this is something Farkapendrucker works.
Using it helped needed.
Running trains.
So for timetables, for us it's pretty simple.
We have one line, one train.
So we take the same timetable since 20 years.
So this works.
But if we get more complicated, we might want to run two trains.
And then we need to have a serious timetable.
We use now J-train graph and FPL edit, which is made for model trains.
Works really well.
The FPL edit author also added GTFS export now.
So we might show up on Google Maps hopefully soon.
And OpenStreetMap and Traveling and all the other apps which could
use GTFS.
So there's probably also some larger software interesting.
We have some stuff like the signaling.
So this is our signal box, the complete signal box.
The other safety feature you need to know, there's a key.
This is something where we can improve on.
And it might be some stuff like just putting a GPS tracker on the train,
which then has the other problem.
There's no mobile phone reception on our line because we're in Germany
and in the middle of nowhere.
So there are lots of things where, for example, the IoT department
can have a field day.
We have passenger information systems, whatever.
So there's a lot of things where you could create new software,
which would help us a lot.
Managing rolling stock.
So right now, every train management, so train cars have regular inspection
dates and a lot of paperwork attached to.
This is now managed in an XCloud and an Excel sheet.
And that's already the advanced technology solution.
Usually it's paper folders.
So a lot of things there.
We have reports, regulations, whatever.
So this is kind of a nightmare right now.
But we also got good feedback from our regulating body
because we handed them readable PDFs and they said they were better
than what they get from Deutsche Bahn.
So what's our problem?
So basically, the left side is the museum railway,
half where we need to know our problems.
We still don't really understand the problems well,
so we need to get better at that.
We need to find the solution and we need to be able to apply the solution.
That will be the big thing.
And the other thing is also the software side of things,
so it needs to fit to our problem.
We need to be able to find this software.
So if you search for ticket systems,
you will find G-RA and all that stuff.
So completely unsearchable now.
And it needs to be really ease of use
because we are not good at computers.
So this whole thing started at the Gulasch Programmier Nacht,
a couple of, actually last year.
We did a workshop at the KS Communication Camp
and a small group formed trying to get the IT nerds
and the railway nerds together.
And that's also what I want to present here.
For you guys, why should you bother
if you don't like playing with trains?
Playing with trains is fun.
But you could also use museum railway as a learning ground.
So if you work in software and want to do something for transport
but don't know how railway works,
we are a place where you can learn that.
We are an experimentation area.
So you can do a lot of stuff on museum railways.
So the railway regulations are quite wide open for experimentation.
So I'm really surprised what's possible sometimes.
Coming from medical device where you can't do anything.
And you can use this as a test bed where you have,
we have the simple case.
So we have one line one train or one line two trains
if it gets more complicated,
but we don't have the full network like DBS.
How you can join?
So to have the super easy entry point,
we just created a Discord chat where you could just join.
We are currently four or five people, so smaller.
Hope to grow more.
We have a wiki at kaosban.net
where we, which was kind of the original idea dumping ground,
which now gets a bit more formalized into a knowledge base
where we try to collect the problem cases,
the possible solutions, where there aren't solutions
to get an overview of things.
And we're starting now to network with different heritage
line associations.
So at the Faudi MT meeting in three weeks in Aachen,
I will present basically this talk again
and do the same publicity for heritage lines then.
So then I'm done.
So join us on the Discord if you like.
We're open for crazy ideas.
And if you want to play with trains,
there's a museum railway near you
which takes you with open arms normally.
There's one question.
Yeah.
More information.
I started this with a Netflix presentation.
And in Norway, we had six rotation train nights
that is using the M plan that we don't mention
to produce netx data.
So they are integrated in national trip mapping.
Yeah.
Yeah, I made a lot of notes during your talk.
So.
We also converted the beganesis.
So just repeating for the video, in Norway,
there are, how many you said, six museum railways
to all you're already using the netx tool from the first talk.
So if you haven't watched the first talk.
Do you regulations on station visibility
that the station has to be on a straight section of track
applied to the historic railways?
We have kind of at the limit of what I know.
So I think we have some kind of heritage protection
that still stuff can stay.
But for example, we have one halt in a curve
which we cannot use anymore because the border of the platform
is not really there.
So it's just a meadow which ends up in the track.
And we need to put a clear border
between the platform and the track there.
So there are some regulations and some safety rules.
But I think not 100% what the big railways have.
In the Czech Republic unfortunately a lot of cities have lost
their railways service because of this regulation.
Yeah.
So for video question was on the, if the regulations for stations
that it must be on a straight part of track
and that everything must be visible
applied for museum railways.
And then Czech Republic, a lot of towns have lost
their railway access to that for that.
So one last question.
Thank you for the presentation.
I really enjoyed it.
I have also a lot of ideas.
I'd be a very consider to get into the debate network.
Because for example in Italy you have the foundation of
like Vain Tardien.
And you can actually buy within the ticketing system
tickets in the Vain Tardien system.
So the question is if we have considered joining
DBNETs or DB infrastructure as well.
Not really.
So for ticketing for example we didn't consider that
because it worked so far.
It was a lot of manual work but somehow it works.
And everything which is external gives external costs
because DB doesn't do stuff for free.
But we get work time for free.
So if we can do it by hand or have to pay for it
then we do it by hand.
But they do have like their eye or their mind.
Yeah.
So there might be something I haven't really looked at that.
But for tracks for example if we go out we are running
on DB tracks and have to join their tools and work
with their tools to get into the timetables.
OK great.
Thank you Niels.
Thank you.