Building an In-House Journey Planner for a Rail-Ticketing App
DBB Software is engineering the intelligence layer behind a UK rail-ticketing product: an in-house journey planner that computes routes, fares, and split-ticket savings directly from the rail industry's official data feeds. The work takes the product from reselling a third-party retail API to owning the engine that finds and prices every journey.
Industry
Travel & Hospitality
Service
MVP development
Team
2 Senior BE Developers, 1 Senior Mobile Developer, 1 Senior Web Developer, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Designer
Project State
February 2026 - Ongoing
Country
United Kingdom
About the Client
Our client is a promising startup that wants to offer consumers a convenient way to book and buy train tickets. Their solution aims to provide users with an alternative to outdated rail-ticketing platforms through an optimized user flow and user-focused UI.
The Client's Initial Request
The client engaged DBB Software to move the journey-planning and pricing intelligence in-house because growth was hitting the ceiling of what a third-party retail API allows.
Lift the Pricing Ceiling
Own the fares and discount logic so the product can apply multiple railcards, surface better split-ticket savings, and price journeys the third-party integration could not.
01
Unblock the Roadmap
Free features like richer ticket detail and control over how results rank and display from an abstraction layer that kept them out of reach.
02
Build on Official Industry Data
Base the engine on the same authoritative feeds the railway itself runs on, so journeys, prices, and routes reflect the real network rather than a reseller's subset.
03
De-Risk Before Committing
Prove the in-house engine is viable, and on what data, so the full build becomes a funded decision rather than a leap of faith.
04
Solutions We Delivered
DBB Software is delivering the journey planner as a governed progression from research to running code, with the same embedded senior team that built the original product.
Feasibility and Standards Research
The team validated the entire public specification corpus of the UK rail retail industry: 24 primary specification documents, roughly 27,000 lines, read end to end, with 74 industry documents mapped. Every prior assumption was fact-checked against live official sources under a deliberately adversarial method: official feeds treated as the only ground truth, and independent blind reviews run to remove confirmation bias.
Solution Architecture and System Design
A provisional System Design Document covers the data platform, journey planning and fares, reservations and payments, real-time data, fulfilment, and after-sales. It reconstructs behaviour the industry's public documentation intentionally leaves to accredited systems, handled through a provenance-tagged architecture so no data format is ever assumed rather than sourced.
Data Engineering on the Official Feeds
The team designed the ingestion layer for the industry's raw feeds: the national timetable in CIF format, the fares dataset, the National Routeing Guide, and reference data for stations and operators. Scheduled jobs pull, validate, and load these daily, handling the formats' well-known traps: fixed-width layouts, sequence rollovers, full-refresh surprises, and records that are never deleted and must be expired by the consumer.
The Journey Planner Engine
A working proof-of-concept, built as a module inside the existing platform, computes station-to-station journeys from raw timetable and routeing data — including interchanges and joined or split trains — then prices them with railcard discounts and validity rules. On top sits the client's own split-ticketing algorithm, which finds cheaper combinations of tickets for the same seats on the same trains, and a live-running overlay that reflects real delays and cancellations. The real-time path is designed for the industry's next-generation streaming platform, aligned to the network's own upgrade cycle.
Results Achieved
The Pricing Ceiling Is Gone
Fares and discounts are computed in-house, so the product is no longer limited to what a third-party retail API chooses to expose.
Journeys Are Computed
The proof-of-concept works out how to get from any GB station to another from the raw official data, including interchanges and split trains.
A Build Grounded in Primary Sources
Every architectural decision traces to a specific rail-industry specification, and the design was hardened by blind review rather than a single author's reading.
A Roadmap No Longer Blocked
Features the abstraction layer kept out of reach are now design decisions the team can make directly. The product's roadmap is bounded by intent rather than by an integration.
Ready for the Network's Real-Time Future
The live-running design targets the rail industry's new streaming platform in the same year the legacy system is switched off, keeping its real-time information current through a transition much of the market still has to navigate.
Own the Intelligence Behind Your Product
DBB Software takes products from integrating someone else's API to owning the engine, grounding every decision in primary-source research and a buildable architecture.
Contact Us
"Most of our work starts with a 30-minute call where someone describes a product they're trying to ship and one part of the engineering picture they can't get around.
If that's where you are, let's set one up; I'll tell you straight whether we're the right fit.”
Mina Morkos
Business Development Manager
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