Recently I travelled by train from Ahmedabad, in the west of India to Lucknow, a city 1500 kms to the north. I was carrying a Nokia phone with Ovi Maps preloaded. I set up Ovi Maps in drive mode to compare the driving route to the route the train would take. The maps show the train tracks, but there is no 'train mode', so to say.
When the train was on its way, I made a few observations -
- the software recalculates the route, if the train and road routes diverge
- one can find out how close the highway was to the train route by looking at the map
- the average speed of the train can be found out
- by extrapolating the route and using the average speed, one can find out when the next station would arrive and one can also find out if the train is on schedule by comparing the estimated arrival time to the value in the time table. In India, most of the trains do not have any announcements system to inform the passgengers about the status ( on time, next station etc.)
One can get more information than obtained above, with the following use cases
- if all the possible train routes are fed into Ovi Maps, one can use the information to know accuratly if the train is running on time. This information can be fed to large displays on the railway stations for the passengers. The same information can also be made available on the mobile phone. The train updates provided by the railway authorities are generally not very accurate, so using Ovi maps can be a better alternative.
- Using a web site (similar to the Nokia Sports Tracker), one can upload the current GPS location while travelling in the train. Useful for those waiting at the station to pick you up !!
- a tourist can select the sight seeing places in the country and Ovi Maps would work out the itinerary, by selecting the trains to choose from. Obviously, depending on the tickets availability.
These are a few use cases but Ovi Maps and the Indian Railways could potentially collaborate to create a platform to offer services which would be
very useful and entertaining to the passengers.
