Squash helps Amtrak

From 'This Week at Amtrak 2007-03-08 at United Rail Passenger Alliance

A private web design in Peoria, Illinois (You remember the hackneyed phrase, "Let's see if it will play in Peoria") has come up with an interesting service for those who wish to monitor Amtrak.s on time performance levels.The company has provided a free web site which will provide a three week accounting of Amtrak on-time history for any given train to any given destination. The site can be found at http://web.peoriadesignweb.com/cgi-bin/amtrak/train.cgi to keep track of your favorite trains.Faraz Hussain of Peoria Design Web explains how the site was developed:

My motivation for developing the on-time performance calculator was so I could schedule my squash matches with my opponents at my destinations. Squash is similar to racquetball in that it is an indoor court sport. I live in Peoria where there are not many squash players so I travel to Chicago and St. Louis often from Bloomington to play better players.

So knowing the statistical delays helps me realistically plan my day when I arrive at my destination. The program is just a program that retrieves information from Amtrak site behind the scenes. I based it off a similar search engine I developed, Medreport.org. Medreport.org lets you create reports by scanning up to thirty websites and extracting content based on your search criteria.

The program did not take more than half a night to develop as I was able to copy/paste a code from Medreport.org . I knew this tool would benefit many others which is why I invested more time to make it robust and easy to use. I am now working on a .Catch a train. script that finds where a particular train is on its route.

This could easily prove to be a user-friendly tool that will benefit many Amtrak-watchers.