We extract train schedules, ticket pricing tiers, live departure boards, and station facility data from Northern Railway. Delivered as clean JSON, CSV, or Parquet to S3, BigQuery, or Snowflake on your cadence.
Structured, schema-consistent data across all major object types — delivered clean, typed, and ready to query.
Complete list of extractable fields for Train Schedules objects from gonorthern.co.uk. All fields typed and schema-versioned.
"route_id": "MAN-LDS-0830", "origin_station": "Manchester Victoria", "destination_station": "Leeds", "departure_time": "2026-10-12T08:30:00Z", "arrival_time": "2026-10-12T09:54:00Z", "duration_minutes": 84, "changes": 0, "train_operator": "Northern"
| # | route_id | origin_station | destination_station | departure_time | arrival_time | duration_minutes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | ||||||
| 3 |
Complete list of extractable fields for Ticket Pricing objects from gonorthern.co.uk. All fields typed and schema-versioned.
"journey_id": "MAN-LDS-0830", "ticket_type": "Advance Single", "fare_class": "Standard", "price": 14.5, "currency": "GBP", "railcard_discount": "16-25 Railcard", "advance_purchase": true, "availability_status": "Available"
| # | journey_id | ticket_type | fare_class | price | currency | railcard_discount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | ||||||
| 3 |
Complete list of extractable fields for Live Departures objects from gonorthern.co.uk. All fields typed and schema-versioned.
"station_code": "MCV", "platform": "3", "scheduled_departure": "08:30", "expected_departure": "08:35", "destination": "Leeds", "status": "Delayed", "delay_reason": "Signalling fault", "operator": "Northern"
| # | station_code | platform | expected_departure | scheduled_departure | destination | status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | ||||||
| 3 |
Complete list of extractable fields for Station Facilities objects from gonorthern.co.uk. All fields typed and schema-versioned.
"station_name": "Hebden Bridge", "crs_code": "HBD", "ticket_machine": true, "waiting_room": true, "parking_spaces": 45, "accessible_toilets": true, "bicycle_storage": 12, "wifi_available": false
| # | station_name | crs_code | ticket_office_hours | ticket_machine | waiting_room | parking_spaces |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | ||||||
| 3 |
Complete list of extractable fields for Disruption Alerts objects from gonorthern.co.uk. All fields typed and schema-versioned.
"alert_id": "INC-8492", "route_affected": "Manchester Victoria to Leeds", "severity": "High", "description": "Tree blocking the railway at Rochdale.", "start_time": "2026-10-12T07:15:00Z", "estimated_clear_time": "2026-10-12T11:00:00Z", "delay_repay_eligible": true, "published_at": "2026-10-12T07:22:00Z"
| # | alert_id | route_affected | severity | description | start_time | estimated_clear_time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | ||||||
| 3 |
Our Northern scraper handles the complexity of UK rail data: dynamic fare grids, live departure boards, multi-leg journey mapping, and disruption alerts - with session management and anti-bot circumvention built in.
Origin, destination, intermediate stops, duration, and train UID - scraped for every active Northern route.
Capture Advance, Off-Peak, and Anytime fares. Monitor yield management systems as prices fluctuate closer to departure.
Extract real-time platform assignments, expected departure times, and delay reasons directly from the live feed.
Ticket office hours, accessibility features, parking capacity, and facility status for all Northern managed stations.
Track network incidents, severity levels, and estimated clear times to map historical reliability.
Extract discounted fare structures across all valid UK Railcard types applied to Northern journeys.
Capture connection points, transfer times, and operator handovers for complex itineraries.
Push live departure updates or sudden price drops directly to your application via HTTP POST.
Run one-off timetable exports or configure continuous pipelines at hourly cadences with change-detection diffing.
Brief in. Clean data out.
Provide origin-destination pairs, station codes, or specific ticket types. We design the extraction schema together.
We configure Scrapy / Playwright crawlers, proxy rotation, session management, and CAPTCHA handling for gonorthern.co.uk.
Schema validation, null-rate checks, price-outlier detection, and sample schedules before full launch.
JSON / CSV / Parquet pushed to your S3 bucket, BigQuery dataset, or Snowflake stage on agreed cadence.
UK rail booking engines use strict session timeouts and bot detection. Here is how we maintain stable extraction.
Booking engines monitor request velocity and browser fingerprints. Our crawlers use UK residential ISP proxies with realistic browser headers and full cookie session management - trained on real commuter search behaviour.
Fare grids and live departure boards rely on heavy client-side rendering. We run full Playwright browser sessions with JavaScript execution to hydrate pricing widgets and capture availability states.
Journey searches expire quickly. We maintain active session states and handle token refreshes automatically, ensuring we can paginate through later trains without triggering security blocks.
For historical fare tracking, we maintain a hash index of last-seen prices. Subsequent runs only push diffs - reducing compute cost and downstream processing load. You get a clean changelog rather than full re-dumps.
Every run emits structured logs to our observability stack. We alert on null-rate spikes, missing fare classes, schema drift, and coverage drops - and respond before you notice.
Travel portals integrate direct operator pricing and timetable updates to maintain parity with their own booking engines.
Data science teams track Advance ticket price curves over time to build predictive models for optimal purchasing windows.
Transit analysts scrape live departure boards and disruption alerts to calculate historical on-time performance and delay frequency.
Mobile applications ingest live platform assignments and delay reasons to provide real-time push notifications to passengers.
Coach operators monitor rail fares on competing routes to optimise their own dynamic pricing algorithms.
Enterprise travel desks audit ticket availability and pricing limits to enforce corporate travel policies.
"UK rail data is notoriously fragmented. Accessing clean, structured pricing and live departure information requires dedicated infrastructure."
Most teams underestimate the investment required: reliable rail scraping requires UK residential proxies, full JavaScript rendering for booking engines, session state maintenance, and anomaly monitoring. DataFlirt absorbs that complexity so your engineers can focus on the analysis - not the infrastructure.
Everything supported by our gonorthern.co.uk scraper — rendered SPA elements, auth walls, rate-limit evasion and beyond.
Open-source tooling on proven cloud infra — no vendor lock-in, full observability.
Scrapy handles crawl orchestration, deduplication, and retry logic. Playwright handles JavaScript rendering, cookie sessions, and interaction flows. Combined via scrapy-playwright middleware.
We maintain pools of residential ISP proxies across UK regions. Rotation happens per-request with sticky sessions where required. IP score monitoring prevents blacklisted pool contamination.
Pipelines run on AWS Lambda (burst) and ECS (sustained). Airflow handles scheduling, dependency management, and SLA alerting. All state stored in managed Postgres.
Data delivered to where your team already works — no new tooling required.
About gonorthern.co.uk scraping, legality, and pipeline operations.
Ask us directly →Scraping publicly available schedule, pricing, and station information is generally permissible. DataFlirt targets only public, non-authenticated timetable and fare data. We do not extract personal passenger data, circumvent authentication walls, or violate GDPR. Clients should review Northern's ToS and consult legal counsel for specific use cases.
We maintain active session tokens and handle cookie refreshes automatically using Playwright. This ensures we can paginate through later trains and capture full daily schedules without triggering security blocks or session expirations.
Live departure boards and disruption alerts can be polled at sub-5-minute intervals. Full timetable and pricing refreshes for defined route sets complete within a 2-4 hour window depending on scale.
Yes. Every pipeline run produces timestamped snapshots. We maintain a time-series table per route and departure time, capturing price fluctuations as the departure date approaches.
Our smallest packages start at a defined route list (typically 50-500 origin-destination pairs) with daily delivery. For network-wide monitoring or higher frequency live board tracking, we price based on volume and compute requirements.
Yes. Live departure board extraction includes expected times, platform assignments, cancellation status, and specific delay reasons published by the operator.
20-minute scoping call. Pilot dataset within the week. Production within two. Whether you need a one-off timetable dump or a continuous fare-monitoring feed across 500 routes - we scope, build, and operate the pipeline. Tell us what you need.
