EARTH · LIVE TRAINS · GREATER BOSTON, USA
MBTA — live trains
MBTA publishes the live positions of its rapid-transit (subway) lines and commuter-rail trains across Greater Boston, USA, and this page draws them on the map in real time. Unlike a schedule, these are the trains actually moving right now — sourced from the operator’s own public feed, shown with the time each position was reported. Live train data like this only exists where an operator chooses to publish it, so most of the world’s railways have no live feed; this is one of the places that do.
About this feed
The dots on the map are MBTAvehicles broadcasting their own GPS through a public real-time feed. We fetch and decode that feed on our own servers and draw only the processed positions — the map never claims a train is somewhere the operator didn’t report. A quiet overnight hour genuinely shows few or no trains, because the feed reflects what is actually running, not a timetable.
Where the data comes from
MBTAshares a live “VehiclePositions” feed — the open GTFS-Realtime format transit agencies use to broadcast where their vehicles are. Only a fraction of the world’s operators publish one with real GPS (many publish only predicted arrival times, which are not positions and are not shown here), which is why the live layer lights up a handful of metros and leaves the rest of the map to the illustrative overlay. The positions are the operator’s; the freshness shown is how long ago the feed last updated, so a stale feed is visible rather than passed off as current.
Other live train systems
The other transit systems whose trains are tracked live right now.