Can anybody help me understand why no stoppages on my current route are showing up? Either when I search a route or browse the list/map. I'm travelling up the River Soar (Southwards) and there is a stoppage on the Grand Union Leicester Line which accoridng to C&RT has been planned for months but isn't showing up when I have been running routes. The stopages are Lock 27-29.
Incidentally, there is currenty a full navigation closure of the River Soar between Redhill and Kings Lock (the whole length) due to flooding.
We're currently moored up at Mountsorrel Lock awaiting clearance to continue. We were supposed to be doing the East Midlands Ring, but now will have go back the way we came to get back to North Warwickshire.
We don't put closures due to flooding in because we just can't keep up with them and CRT notices for flooding are very often just removed with no notifications.
Winter closures are not in the system because CRT do not make them available in an easy format for us to process - plus they're on their third version of them already this autumn.
If CRT Do not send out a notification for a closure then Canalplan will not know about it - this actually happens a lot.
Quote from: Stephen AttyWe don't put closures due to flooding in because we just can't keep up with them and CRT notices for flooding are very often just removed with no notifications.
Winter closures are not in the system because CRT do not make them available in an easy format for us to process - plus they're on their third version of them already this autumn.
If CRT Do not send out a notification for a closure then Canalplan will not know about it - this actually happens a lot.
Thanks for that Stephen.
What about stoppages that are live in their searchable database? How do they publish them to you? The lock closures are now showing on the searchable database (and C&RT assure meet they have been there for a long while).
I am interested because I used both canalplan and the C&RT website to plan the East Midlands Ring and neither came up with stoppages. I realise I shouldn't rely on canalplan alone. But I want to establish if I have done something wrong on the official website: or if they failed to publish the stoppage.
Incidentally when I spoke to them yesterday their customer services advisor assured me for 15 mins that the route was clear (pending the flood depleting). I pressed again and again as a passing boat told me that they had been the last boat through lock 27. Eventually the CSA found the closure.
They send stoppages out by email - I have checked those two stoppages and they are not in our DB at all so that means we've never known about them. There is no searchable API and scraping their website is not practical. They often don't sent out emails saying closures have been cancelled or finished early - I've written some dirty code that can check that because we have the urls but when they don't send anything out in the first place we're pretty much at their mercy. I thought I'd check to see what opencanal map shows but for some reason on my phone it doesn't show any stoppages at all.
Quote from: Stephen AttyThey send stoppages out by email - I have checked those two stoppages and they are not in our DB at all so that means we've never known about them. There is no searchable API and scraping their website is not practical. They often don't sent out emails saying closures have been cancelled or finished early - I've written some dirty code that can check that because we have the urls but when they don't send anything out in the first place we're pretty much at their mercy. I thought I'd check to see what opencanal map shows but for some reason on my phone it doesn't show any stoppages at all.
Thanks for this, I've been looking around to see whether there was any sensible way to get stoppage information in a useful data form, and I guess this confirms that neither CanalPlan or the OpenCanal teams have anything better than (at best) some code gathering data by scraping stoppage emails, or entering it manually.
Hmpf.
it's a pity they don't offer an API to do it - like the EA do for their flood data.