.com - London Transport Service Vehicles on the webAn all-new version of this website is now available at www.ltsv.com/sv/. These pages are no longer being updated.
| .com - London Transport Service Vehicles on the web | |||||||
An all-new version of this website is now available at www.ltsv.com/sv/. These pages are no longer being updated. | |||||||
Fleet News 2 fleet news items posted in 2022. | Site News 7 site news items posted in 2022. | Select a year |
| NB: To view recent updates and additions to the database, use the View latest data link in the top left corner of each page. 29/03/2022 Things have been remarkably quiet over the past couple of months. I have some withdrawals to catch up on but the only new vehicle reported was 9107F, a Ford Transit van with Trams. Details such as the reg and exact type were not obtained, so that is one to look out for. The apparent plan to apply company-wide fleetnumbers to Go-Ahead London service vehicles may be back on again. RX71SZP at Morden Wharf has FV76 in a window label, while RX71SYU (recently moved from NP to BX) is FV65. This has been applied using white lettering, but only on the front. Bexleyheath's RJ19HSK still carries its 'local' fleetnumber of BX1 in eight different positions! Rather surprising news is that Stagecoach has applied to use the Leas Road (Guildford) garage to run buses. This was the former LT/LCBS garage recently closed by Arriva, and it was understood the site had already been sold to redevelopers. Further details are awaited. 15/01/2022 Not very much has been reported recently, and I have just done the first database update in over a month. Additions include two more Vito minibuses for Go-Ahead, another Transit Connect for Metroline (Falcon Coachworks) and a couple of Peugeot vans with DLR. I suspect that most of the anonymous VW Transporter minibuses used by Go-Ahead London recently will now have departed. Various other vehicles have been marked as withdrawn, usually based on licensing data. Some good news is that the four delayed Point Care vans finally got to Arnos Grove around the turn of the year. | 01/04/2022 Farewell grey pages! The new website seems to be working as planned so I have decided to go ahead and 'close' this site. Log-in will no longer be available, though the pages will be left in-situ for the time being. 31/03/2022 Made it! Having spent a couple of days wrangling some seriously large amounts of data, the new LTSV (London Transport Service Vehicles) website has just been put on-line and can now be viewed at www.ltsv.com/sv/. The site is technically still in 'testing' but it may be possible to have a formal 'cut-over' as early as tomorrow. This would entail updating the LTSV portal page and 'locking' this website (now the 'old' LTSV) by preventing users from logging-in. The grey pages will however remain accessible (read-only) for the time being. There are also a couple of dozen sightings entered yesterday that I need to copy across. If you get a chance to take a look at the new site, I would appreciate any feed-back, particularly if you find any errors or glitches. 29/03/2022 Still quiet, but there has been a lot of progress off-line and the new site should be available for viewing/testing in a few days time. I think I am going to skip doing a March batch of photos, though I have still been receiving a few. I now need to think about how the cut-over from the old site to the new site will be handled. At some point I need to stop people adding stuff to the old site, but then I need a bit of time to bring the data on the new site up to date. Hmmm... Sad news is that John Marshall died a few weeks ago. John had supplied a lot of 'vintage' photos to LTSV, plus of course he enabled us to access his huge collection of London Transport documents. These helped add a lot of data to the vehicle histories, and the documents are now available to view on the LTSV-LTA website. 07/03/2022 Things have been a bit quiet on LTSV over the past few months. One of the reasons for this is the reduced number of sightings and photos being submitted, no doubt due to the lousy weather and the ongoing COVID situation. Plus of course it has now been a year since we lost Steve Howard. Another reason is that we have not managed to get an updated list from the nice people at Acton for a couple of years. Yet another reason is that I have been doing some long-overdue home improvement work (turns out that I can build websites better than I can plaster walls!). But the main reason is that I have been busy putting together the next version of this website. Having completed the construction of the LTSV-RRV website (if not all the data content), I resumed work on LTSV3 in early February, since when I have coded and tested over 80 new pages, for functions such as resetting passwords, adding groupcodes, editing vehicle class codes as well as the addition, display and editing of photos, vehicles, notes etc. According to my masterplan, there are only another 30 or so to do, and some of these may not be essential. The new website is being built from scratch rather than by modifying the existing one, although it does use some process templates that I developed for LTSV-RD and LTSV-RRV. When creating the pages, I have four goals in mind. Firstly, to make them more secure, reducing the possibility of hacks or other attacks. Secondly, the pages will be more user-friendly, with guidance notes and previews etc. Thirdly, the pages will do more to trap and advise of any user errors, such as entering a date of 30/02/2017. Fourthly, there will be more background tracking of edits, to enable any problems to be traced. Other considerations are to make the code easier (for me) to read (simplifying later modification), and to make text displayed on the pages easier (for you) to read at a variety of screen sizes. I have been talking about this new website for a long time, and here is an illustration of why its development has taken so long. I was building a new version of the 'Advanced' fleet list. This exists on the current site and is useful in that it allows the vehicle data to be looked at in more ways than on the 'basic' fleet list. For example, you can use it to see which vehicles have the most photos or sightings, were used for the longest time, or are currently unlicensed. To achieve this, the page requires queries with aggregate functions, ie ones that perform calculations on data from tables other than the main source of the data. These are relatively easy to do but they can become rather unwieldly, especially when you have multiple functions and/or large datasets. The issue is compounded if you also want to allow sorting. Only up to 100 records are ever displayed on the screen at one time but, to allow sorting, the calculations have to be performed on all records before the order can be determined. I tested the new queries directly in the database, and they returned results in less than one second. However, when I put the queries into the new webpage, the results took much longer to appear, more like minutes than seconds. This is clearly unacceptable and I have now spent several days trying to find a solution that works. It's not all bad news though and one job took a lot less time than expected. There are currently 7,119 photos on the LTSV website, each of which exists in both normal and 'thumbnail' sizes. The new website also adds extra-large copies of many, meaning that over 16,000 files needed uploading to the 'live' server at some point. I decided to start on this last week, thinking I could do it in a few chunks. However, my upload speed seems to have improved considerably, and all the files went up in just a couple of hours. I am tempted to set myself a target of getting the new website on-line for 1st April (which seems appropriate somehow!). Depending on how the work progresses, this may be in read-only format to start with, pending the synchronisation of the data in the new website with that in the current one. Either way, the end is in sight! 18/02/2022 I hope you are not having too much trouble with wind today! A new set of 34 photos has just been uploaded. The first 11 are part of the rolling retrospective, this month looking at C-prefix vehicles. The other 23 photos are all from the last few months. 28/01/2022 There haven't been many updates over the past few weeks, mainly because I have been busy completing work on a new LTSV website. This site (my fourth) has now been launched and it may be of some interest to visitors here. It covers road vehicles used by UK railway companies, and features a large amount of data that was supplied by Merfyn Jones. The addition of records is only half complete but it will eventually detail all known vehicles operated from the 1920s to the present. There will also be photos, and users will be able to register for an account and then add their own sightings and notes. To view the new site, head to my 'portal' page at https://www.ltsv.com. If you happen to see any relevant vehicles (e.g. Network Rail, Freightliner, Southern etc) while out and about, I would be very happy to receive reports and/or photos. I will now be resuming work on the updated version of the service vehicle website and hope to have this finished in a month or two. 05/01/2022 A batch of 26 photos has been added today. As I had included a set of A-prefix registered vehicles last month, I decided to do some B-prefix ones this time, these being the first 11 photos. Let me know if you think I should continue with this theme for the next batch! The other 15 photos cover more recent developments, including the first Maxus vehicles and some rare Toyota Yaris cars. |