Arrivals - Current Location Property

[KamranTailor]

Hi,

I am trying to get the location of arrivals when I use the endpoint
https://api.tfl.gov.uk/Line/victoria/Arrivals it gives responses like Between Finsbury Park and Seven Sisters or Approaching Blackhorse Road.

This seems rather inconsistent, I was wondering if there is a list of possible connectors like “Between” or “Approaching” that are used. Or alternatively a better way to get the locations of the trains perhaps giving back coordinates.

I have also encountered a similar dilemma when fetching bus locations. I get the arrivals https://api.tfl.gov.uk/StopPoint/490011515W/Arrivals and the curent location comes back as "currentLocation": ""

Thanks,
Kamran

[LeonByford]

Hello and welcome to the forum!

The currentLocation property is only intended to be used to display that piece of text in a user interface. I wouldn’t recommend trying to parse or interpret that property.

We do not provide latitude and longitude of London Underground trains, although the Trackernet API does have a trackCode property that may be of use to you. Please see this post for more information on location data for London Underground trains:

Underground App

Unfortunately only using the location string is unlikely to yield any accurate results, even if you do get your hands on the full list of possible strings, because as you have identified, some strings can be used for track sections in either direction. Another example of strings you’ll see often is something like “Approaching Oxford Circus” or “Departing Oxford Circus”, without any platform or direction information. Because of this, you can’t really judge the direction of a train based off of …

As for buses, we publish location data to the Bus Open Data Service. You can access this data in SIRI-VM format from there.

[KamranTailor]

Thank you!

I will definitely look into using Trackernet and the Bus Open Data Service