About us
Who makes this guide, what changes it, and what stops a bad change from reaching you
What has to be true before a change reaches this page
The schedule archive this site is built from is reissued by the operator every few weeks, and each reissue is a chance for something to quietly move. So a new edition does not go straight to the website. It is rebuilt into a separate directory and the result is compared, station by station and line by line, with what is currently published.
If the network came out identical — same stations, same lines, same names, same order — the new timetable is promoted on its own, because only the times changed and that is what a reissue is supposed to change. If anything about the network itself is different, nothing is promoted and a person has to go and look at why.
That rule exists because of the shape of the danger. An update that breaks loudly gets fixed the same morning. The update that costs a reader a trip is the one that arrives looking perfectly reasonable.
A mistake that got through, and what it looked like
On the Norristown line, two stations — Gulph Mills and Norristown Transit Center — have one platform filed under a parent station and the platform for the opposite direction filed under nothing at all. The code that merges platforms into stations originally only looked at the ones with no parent. At those two stops the orphan half overwrote the half that had a parent, and both stations lost their platforms in the northbound direction.
What that looked like on the page was not an error message. It looked like a fact: the line appeared to end at Bridgeport. Every page was internally consistent, every total added up, and two real stations had quietly stopped existing in one direction.
It was found and corrected — the merge now walks every group, not just the orphans — and it is written down here because it is the honest shape of this work. The errors worth worrying about are not the ones that look like errors.
Three pairs of stations that look like transfers and are not
These pairs sit close enough together that a map makes them look like one place. They are not connected, the source does not join them, and neither does this guide: no passage, no posted transfer, and a walk at street level.
| Station | and station | Apart | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|
| 13th Street | Walnut-Locust | 452 m | L / B |
| 13th Street | Race-Vine | 558 m | L / B |
| 5th Street/Independence Hall | Chinatown | 593 m | L / B |
Inventing a connection here would be easy and would read well. It would also put somebody on the street with a bag at eleven at night. If you need to change between the two lines, the interchanges that genuinely exist are 15th St/City Hall, 8th & Market and 69th Street Transit Center.
The third line is not a subway, and its pages say so
Two of the three lines here are city rapid transit, running every few minutes. The third, the Norristown High Speed Line, is a fully segregated interurban that leaves the city for Delaware and Montgomery County, and in the middle of the day it runs every half hour.
Those are different things to plan a trip around, so the pages for that line state the interval plainly instead of borrowing the reassurance of the word “subway”. A guide that flattens the difference is easier to write and leaves somebody standing on a platform in Bridgeport for twenty-five minutes wondering what they got wrong.
Who decides what goes in
This site is published by Nireweb, part of the travel and transit guide network GoRandom, based in Bilbao, Basque Country (Spain). David Franco Aguirre is responsible for what appears on it: he decides what is included, reads the figures before they go out, and answers the mail.
It is paid for by the advertising it carries, and by nothing else; the full statement of that, and of what this site is and is not, is in the legal notice.
If a number here is wrong
Write to [email protected] and say which page you saw it on. With the page, a report can be checked against the source the same day; without it, finding the number takes an afternoon.