For years I've dreamed of building a scale model of a large railway station in the UK.

I've also want to fully automate that layout, running trains in "real time" because I like a challenge.

A few years ago I discovered that Network Rail provide access to loads of their data for free, and the part of me that loves half-baked ideas said "You could use that to run the model railway instead of coding it all yourself"

In this talk, I'll be talking about my progress so far, what the challenges have been, and where I want to go next with it, as well as talking about how you can do the same using cheap hardware and open-source software.

Now all I need is a large field to build a scale model of Cardiff Central...