Distant Signal

Distant Signal is a personal UK rail companion. It shows the status of every line, tracks your trains and journeys as they run, plans trips and helps with Delay Repay claims.

Use it at ds.cursed.solutions.

The screenshots come from the e2e test fixtures, not real users' data (see Screenshots).

Features

• Line status for National Rail and TfL, in the style of TfL's Unified API. Disruption on a shared stretch of track shows on every line that uses it, and nowhere else.
• Train tracking from live movement data: each calling point's scheduled, expected and actual times, platforms, cancellations and the reason for a delay.
• Journeys of one or more legs, by train, tram, Tube, bus or on foot, with progress as you travel and Web Push notifications when something changes.
• Trip planning over the timetable, including Metrolink trams.
• Stations and departure boards, with nearby stations.
• Ireland and Northern Ireland: Iarnród Éireann and NI Railways stations and lines, with live departures at Iarnród Éireann stations. There's no line status for either network.
• Groups, to share trains and journeys with the people you travel with.
• Tickets and Delay Repay estimates, from the recorded times of the trains you took, and a record of how reliable your journeys have been.
• A public API, with delegated access for connected apps.

Architecture

Distant Signal is a set of small Rust services around one Postgres database, with a Next.js frontend. Producers write to Postgres directly or to Redis streams, which ingest-writer applies. The api serves the frontend and the public API. The workers derive line status, enrich incident text and send notifications.

graph LR
  subgraph producers[Producers]
    pollers["pollers<br/>incidents, departures, stations,<br/>operators, TfL, Ireland, transit"]
    trust["movement-relay and the<br/>TRUST consumers"]
    sched["schedule-ingest,<br/>schedule-reference"]
  end
  streams[("Redis streams<br/>ds:ingest:*, movement-events")]
  writer[ingest-writer]
  pg[("Postgres")]
  agg["aggregator,<br/>enricher"]
  notifier[notifier]
  api["api<br/>(axum)"]
  fe["frontend<br/>(Next.js)"]
  browser([browser])

  pollers --> pg
  pollers --> streams
  trust --> streams
  trust --> pg
  sched --> pg
  streams --> writer --> pg
  pg <--> agg
  pg --> notifier
  pg --> api
  api --> fe --> browser
  notifier -. "Web Push" .-> browser

DESIGN.md has the full design: the data sources, the domain model and the reasoning behind each choice.

How line status works

Every line comes from the curated catalogue in ds-core's lines/, one TOML file per passenger route (lines/SCHEMA.md has the format). Each station on a line belongs to a named segment. A segment name that appears on several lines is a shared trunk: an incident there shows on every line that uses it. An incident on a segment unique to one line shows only there. That distinction, for operators with parallel routes over shared track such as SWR, Southeastern and Northern, is the project's original core.

The matcher grades each incident-to-line match, from an exclusive segment (most confident) down to an operator-only match, which is capped at Minor Delays and dropped when a more precise match exists. Severities follow TfL's scale, with two National Rail additions; DESIGN.md §5 has the details.

Repositories

The project is split across these repositories (the repo split, docs/specs/repo-split.md):

Repository	Role
distant-signal (this one)	The frontend, the project's front page, docs and dev stack. It owns all issues.
ds-core	The shared crates, the database schema and migrations, grants, the stream envelope and the line catalogue.
ds-api	The api, the trip planner and the timetable services, with the generated API types and changelog.
ds-ingest	ingest-writer, the Kafka relays and the TRUST movement consumers.
ds-pollers	The pollers.
ds-workers	aggregator, enricher and notifier.
ds-deploy	The Helm charts and the deploy tooling.
ci	Shared workflows, actions and the Renovate preset.
.github	The organisation profile, the security policy, the contributing guide and the issue forms.
DS-MCP (hosted elsewhere)	An MCP server for Distant Signal. It consumes the public API.

Getting started

The repository holds the Next.js frontend (frontend/), the docs, the dev stack and Python tooling (scripts/, managed with uv). The frontend's API types come from the api image frontend/api-image.txt pins; the Rust services are in the repositories above.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗