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  • Discussion relating to commuter rail, light rail, and subway operations of the MBTA.
Discussion relating to commuter rail, light rail, and subway operations of the MBTA.

Moderators: sery2831, CRail

 #1529936  by Zash
 
Hello! I'm planning on making a physical board (with addressable LEDs) of the entire MBTA system in Boston, indicating where the trains are along each line. I got the basis from this (https://sites.harvard.edu/~wuensch/T/subway-map.html) website made by one of your users! I wanted to send him a PM, but I don't have access to PMs. I was just wondering if anyone who has experience with the open source code the MBTA released about where their trains are could detail their experiences as I'm just looking for as much insight as possible.
 #1532300  by DaWolf85
 
I have had some experience messing with the GTFS-Realtime feeds (which is probably what you'd want to use as well, to allow you to collect all system data with one request). Each vehicle has a latitude/longitude location attached to it if you use the Vehicle Positions feed. These locations are mostly not GPS locations (except I believe on the Green Line aboveground) but instead seem to represent track circuits, mapped to a set latitude and longitude. The feeds are not perfectly consistent in representing all vehicles that are on the tracks, but they are pretty close.

Google provides some very helpful documentation for GTFS-Realtime, as well as the CSV-based GTFS files that the feed references. MBTA provides the feed locations, as well as a few other helpful links, on their developers page (you'll have to click through to the specific feed you want to use).