Uk Live Train Movement Feed Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

A UK live train movement feed is not one product - it is five concurrent message streams, and each answers a different operational question. All five run over STOMP messaging inside Network Rail Data Feeds, Great Britain's official rail open-data platform, covering the national network managed or operated by Network Rail Infrastructure Limited.

MOVEMENT carries train positioning and movement event data - the TRUST stream behind most third-party tracking apps. TD reports positioning at signalling berth level, and together the TRUST and TD streams produce millions of messages per week, making TD the densest signal on the platform. TSR publishes temporary reductions in permissible speed across the network, VSTP carries schedules created through the VSTP process that are not available via SCHEDULE, and RTPPM measures the percentage of trains arriving at their destination on time, reported at operator and sector level.

Granularity is per event, not per aggregate: individual train events per signalling berth or timing point. That shape explains who builds on it - four of Datadory's eight personas tag this dataset at relevance 3, including Developers & Data-Product Builders shipping live tracking features and Market Researchers & Consultants analyzing GB train performance from official RTPPM and movement histories rather than press summaries. Datadory scores the platform 9 out of 10 on its 0-10 quality rubric, and it is the only realtime source among the 8 primary datasets in the highways and rail tracks pool.

Access is registration-gated rather than contract-gated, and six steps take you from browser to live berths:

Across the whole platform you will meet four format families: json, cif, xml and stomp. The portal also links a status page for live service availability and the Rail Data Marketplace for additional feeds beyond the core nine.

VSTP closes the gap the timetable cannot: it streams schedules created at short notice that never made it into SCHEDULE, so your live picture is SCHEDULE plus VSTP deltas, never either alone. RTPPM then needs the same anchor to mean anything - a percentage-of-trains-on-time measure is only computable against a scheduled arrival.

Berth codes and TIPLOCs are not coordinates. To draw a train on a map you need track geometry, electrification and speed context from the open-geospatial side of this industry, and four sources cover it without spending anything.

Two practical notes when pairing them. Overpass is fully keyless but the FOSSGIS main instance asks heavy users to stay below roughly 10,000 queries and 1 GB per day, and its main index also serves attic data, so a past state of the railway can be queried by timestamp. Overture's August 2026 transportation release lists about 128 million residential and 34.9 million service road segments alongside roughly 1.5 million rail segments, which makes it the fastest route to a routable GB-plus-Europe rail layer in GeoParquet. If your question is live operational state versus infrastructure geometry, a dedicated vs OpenStreetMap Overpass API comparison scores the two head to head, and the highways railtracks data hub indexes every option in the 15-dataset pooled set.

Read the highways railtracks data guide for the full landscape this article draws from - 8 primary datasets spanning government asset inventories and open geospatial networks, every one free. Then go persona-deep: the data scientists use cases page covers streaming MOVEMENT, VSTP and RTPPM into rail models, the developers builders use cases page walks the registered-access build path end to end, and the market researchers use cases page shows how GB performance analysis gets assembled from official measures. The free highways-railtracks datasets list confirms the price tag across the pool, and the Network Rail Data Feeds record stays the single bookmark that matters for this topic.