Best way to get up to date/live arrivals

Hi All,
Myself and a small team of trainee developers are trying to make an app focused on data sonification of tube arrival times for a number of main lines. The idea being, when a train arrives, a tone is triggered…there is a lot more to it but I don’t want to bore you! We are using a javascript/express/node.js stack and I am making fetch requests with no issues to the unified api, specifically to this end point: https://api.tfl.gov.uk/Line/:line/Arrivals. Problem is, every time we make a request, the data seems to flick between up to date and old (based on the timestamp) and there doesn’t seem to be any reliable way to ascertain where a train is or when it has reached the platform. Even the ‘at platform’ value seems a bit unreliable. I have seen interactive maps and trackers that appear to use this unified api. So my question is, what could I be doing wrong? Is there a better way to get regular up to date arrival information for trains along a line?
Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

@abodian Wecome.

Are you using your app_key when making the requests? I think this behaviour can be seen if you fail to use your app_key.

Thanks for the reply Brian. Yes app_key and id both in there for the requests.

Hi @abodian, can you please try again? We’ve reset our API cache just now which should hopefully resolve the issue

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Hello, still seems to jump around a lot. I’ve shown an example in this video:

https://streamable.com/iz8et2

You can see on lines 16 and 17 of the postman console that the timestamp and seconds to arrival are jumping up and down and alternating between older timestamps and new timestamps. Unless I’m misinterpreting things.
The link expires after a day.

I have the similar issue
Sometimes expectedArrival changes to the old date.
Today I got 2023-02-27 several times in the response