Calling All Railway Professionals (worldwide) in the Alteryx Community!

[ThomasDurham]

Are you working in the railway sector and using Alteryx in your organization? If so, I’d love to connect!

I'm looking to build a network of railway professionals leveraging Alteryx Designer and explore how we’re applying it across different use cases. Whether it’s:

• Network optimization
• Predictive maintenance
• Operational efficiency
• Safety & compliance analytics
• Any other railway-related applications

Drop a comment below on how you use Alteryx in your railway workflows or connect with me directly. Looking forward to collaborating!  #Alteryx #RailwayAnalytics #DataScience #RailwayInnovation #AlteryxCommunity #Railway #Trains

[KGT]

I don't work on Railway problems these days, but in a previous life I worked on a couple of things railway related.

For one job (about 2015), we had to model the train route using telemetry at each minute and then provide where it was every 20m. This of course, varied distances between points depending on speed and so interpolation was a little more interesting. Using a spatial representation of the track from Sydney to Brisbane, I buffered the line to become a polygon and then looked at where the train was not inside the polygon. Classic cases were examples like Broadmeadow train station, where the train had passed through on a track that goes around the platforms, and was registering 80m off the "course". So, we accounted for situations like that and were able to look at areas where trains were constantly in "non-standard" locations. That was all for further analysis downstream.

It's a fascinating topic, with so much data to do really cool things around efficiency. I'll be flagging this to check in on.

Also, Alteryx has had a couple of Industry User Groups at different times, and some of the catch-ups at Inspire have been close to 100 people. This may fit in as a subsection of an industry user group. https://community.alteryx.com/t5/User-Group-Resources/How-to-Build-an-Interest-Based-User-Group/ta-p...

[ThomasDurham]

Hi KGT, 

Thanks for sharing your experience—this sounds like a fascinating use case! 

I’d love to learn more about the work you did:

1. Did you use Alteryx for this project, or was it built using other tools?
2. Which organization were you working with at the time? (If you’re able to share)
3. Were there any measurable metrics or outcomes from the analysis? For example:

• Improvements in location accuracy or interpolation precision
• Detection of high-risk non-standard train locations
• Any operational or efficiency improvements as a result of these insights
  
  

I’m mapping out railway-related Alteryx use cases and this seems like a great example of how spatial analytics can be applied. Would love to hear more if you’re open to sharing!

Please feel free to message me privately via the community.

Thanks again, 
Tom

[KGT]

Hey, 

I don't remember too much about it, just the method taken as I spent a little time trying different spatial methods to see how automated I could make it. I actually don't even remember which org it was, but the trains on that track were managed by countrylink, and so whichever org that falls under may have been it...

There were several things they wanted to use it for downstream, but the interpolation was the issue. The best solution they had previously, combined the telemetry locations to the train line and then basically moved the latitude onto the track (Sydney to Brisbane is a North/South line). From there, the solution they had just got worse trying to "create" points in a very rudimentary manner. 

So, we were able to show how to create 20m points on the track, flag where the geo representation of the track wasn't accurate, show the ways that we accounted for errors etc. All in Alteryx. It was only a few hours work spread over 2-3 days. I'm pretty sure I could recreate it on that data in about 2 hours now, (9-10 years later), if I had to.

I always loved the quick solutions that were just so much better than a company previously had.

[ThomasDurham]

Hi KGT, 

Thank you for sharing your insights!

It has helped me compile some helpful use cases within the Railway industry. 

Many thanks, 

Tom