Everyone knows that when you start commuting to work in a new city you make a web app to assist in planning travel your travel to and from said city, so when I began commuting to Chicago last Thursday I put my nose to the grindstone and produced this little beauty.

I know what you’re thinking: so what? A little website that helps a very small handful of people who take the BNSF Metra between Naperville and Chicago, all of whom will probably never know it exists? And you’re right: it really is just only for me but what makes it interesting in my eyes is how it works. Using some fancy techniques from this excerpt by Jonathan Stark I was able to assemble a little page that caches itself to your iPhone and will load from the cache without the need for cellular, 3G or WiFi connectivity and persists after reboots or resets. This is perfect because my building, despite having a large AT&T office within its walls, gets very poor AT&T network connectivity.

Oh and in the future if I ever need to change things or add features a little javascript is in place to check for any changes on the network and download anything that needs to be updated. So if you take the train between Naperville and Chicago, go ahead and add this little site to your home screen. I even made an icon from the train symbol in Google Maps!

BNSF Naperville Train Schedule (Optimized for an iPhone, but should work in any browser.)

Update: It looks like I neglected a couple of details. Under the “Day” tab you’ll find the Naperville to Chicago train schedule and under the “Night” tab is the reverse trip. The times are also ranked according to travel time with green representing 30-40 minutes, yellow representing 40-50 minutes and red representing over 50 minutes. In other words, greens are express trains and the others aren’t. I’d like to ultimately turn this into a less specific tool and accommodate additional data and maybe even turn it into a free little app but I need to do a little more research first.