It’s not often that a government operated agency does something cool or modern, but I noticed today that Amtrak was breaking the mold.

Riding to the NE Regional to NYC, I noticed that the Amtrak tracking page kept updating, even when internet connectivity failed on the WIFI. Odd… does that mean that the servers are on the train?

joe@tp:~$ tracepath www.amtrakconnect.com
 1?: [LOCALHOST]                    pmtu 1500
 1: 10.80.104.1                     8.641ms
 1: 10.80.104.1                     16.690ms
 2: 10.80.104.1                     6.179ms pmtu 1350
 2: www.amtrakconnect.com          5.424ms reached
    Resume: pmtu 1350 hops 2 back 2

Interesting. The call is coming from inside the train! Let’s look at the webpage and see if we can find the API.

Found it. Now let’s cut out the middle man and track our progress to Penn Station via Bash.

joe@tp:~$ curl -s http://www.amtrakconnect.com/gps_provider_prod.php | jq '.'
{
    "err":false,
    "lat": "43.657510",
    "lon": "-70.282448",
}

joe@tp:~$ curl -s http://www.amtrakconnect.com/gps_provider_prod.php | jq '.'
{
    "err":false,
    "lat": "43.677390",
    "lon": "-70.286580",
}

Looks like we’re moving! But crap… I hope the entire navigation system isn’t written in PHP.