E‐Mail Templates for annoying railway companies about GTFS feeds

The messages below are examples of previously sent messages. Please remember to replace all the contained information (times, dates, urls and errors) before sending.

Feed is broken

Hi,

I'm writing to notify you that your GTFS feed at https://www.pv.lv/xml/atdtransit/GTFS.zip has started containing an error today between 14:54 UTC and 16:34 UTC today (2024-02-29).

The error is: Error while parsing GTFS feed: In trip '72081' for stoptime with seq=1: stop time sequence collision. Sequence has to increase along trip.

I would be grateful if you could forward this information to the person who is responsible for maintaining the feed.

Thank you!

Feed is missing

Dear Sir or Madam, // Replace by hi depending on the vibe of the company

I am one of the people working on a free service that allows to find international train and bus connections. We are all volunteers and building the service because so far there wasn't really anything that does what we need.

While trying to collect timetables, I wasn't able to find any from your company in a format that I can use. While GTFS is the format that I need in the end, I am happy about anything I can get, and would like to try to convert it. GTFS data is also useful for making your trains available in larger services like Google Maps, so I would be open to share the result and tools in case I can convert your timetable to GTFS.

All I would need is the source data that you use for your online timetable. Something like an SQL database export, a CSV / Excel table or ideally GTFS is all that I'd need.

Just in case you want to see that I'll use the data for something useful, you can try an early version of our service on https://routing.spline.de/.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,

Feed is only available on Google Maps

Hi,

I am working on a free and open source service that allows to find international train and bus connections. We are all volunteers and building the service in our free time.

While trying to collect timetables, I noticed the public transport in your city is available on Google Maps, but I couldn't find the GTFS-feed anywhere.

Would you be open to sharing the GTFS-feed you probably share with Google, for example on your website, as well? If you don't have a suitable web server to publish it, I'm open to hosting one you can use.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards,