Mistral Data
Mistral Data’s Berth Maps – Creating Virtual GPS Berths for Granular Location Information
This article first appeared in the Railway-News Magazine Issue 1 2024.
At Mistral Data, we bring together and enrich data created within multiple sources that manage railway operations, providing the context and information needed for train operators to run their services more efficiently, leading to quicker and better-informed decisions.
Mistral Data specialises in complex data integrations, and has experience with rail industry data, including both legacy rail systems and more modern real-time API-generated data feeds, whether that be operational, customer or commercial datasets.
UK train operators use network schematic products to track their services across the network. These products use TRUST and TD to show service location, through a network of berths – often associated with a signal. Unfortunately, these sources either rely on manual entry of location by signallers or can place a service within a berth which can be more than ten miles long.
Given the UK has areas without TD coverage, and several areas with long section berths, Mistral Data created Berth Maps in response to these market limitations, developing the industry first Virtual GPS Berths to show exact location of a service on a schematic map.
Virtual GPS Berths provide granular location detail by dividing real berths into virtual berths, defined by geofences for more detailed tracking by GPS. This allows a long TD berth to be split for example into track, bridge, track, tunnel, track, station – allowing signallers to make informed decisions, including when managing calls from level crossing users.
