Romanian real-time train departures are just webcams showing the actual departure board

30 comments
  1. Really efficient when it works, but both systems will be wrong the minute the tiniest mechanical fault occurs, not to mention when repairs need to be conducted.

  2. It is a rather obscure option, a very old one, for the stations that still have analog tables.

    You can just check the website of the train company, CFR Călători, which is quite nice, as you would normally expect. It obviously includes all the stations, with or without a webcam, and can also check the last known location of any train.

  3. LOL jugaad at its finest!

    For context, jugaad is a Hindi word that essentially means “solving problems using whatever tools you have”. It’s not an exact translation but it’s the closest thing I can think of right now. Us Indian people are famous for this shit, I didn’t know Eastern Europe had this too xD

  4. – How do we make sure departure info on the website is synchronised with what actually happens at the station?
    – Well, so we need a central server, a microservice that will talk to a message bus that will send data to central database. We need to plan for network outages, make sure no conflicting data can be inserted …
    – Shut up and just point a webcam at the board

  5. I’m reminded of that scene in Armageddon when the one guy talks about American ingenuity to spend millions of dollars to develop the pen that writes upside down while the Russian ingenuity was to simply use pencil.

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