JoshP
Service Attendant
Anyone have noticed the tracker at amtrak.com and asm has been not functionally properly past few days?
Amtrak Tracker issues
- Thread starter JoshP
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Help Support Amtrak Unlimited Discussion Forum:
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I have. I check both of them fairly often and it has been strictly hit or miss, more miss than hit, lately.
Have you considered contacting the owner of the ASM one? I believe there is contact info in the About section?? It's there somewhere.
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THANKS for the suggestion. I will check that out.
JoshP
Service Attendant
I'm IT and I own a hosting business so it looks like API is having issues at Amtrak's end so that is why I don't see updates at ASM so I'll let the developer know about the issue.
Ryan
Court Jester
Believe it or not, this existed before you wandered into the room. It happens from time to time and will be corrected in due course.
JoshP
Service Attendant
I can believe that but the new record for me it was not loading properly past few days non-stop esp. last Monday that didn't load all day and I am sure you will correct whenever it's due time.
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Thanks for the information. It also clearified something else for me, what the colors represent. I knew the map used a color code but being "chromomatically challenged" I can only see 2 of the 5 colors. At least I now know what those 2 mean.
In case you can't find it, ASM is here.
ASM gets its information from the Amtrak reservations system. Transitdocs and Amtrak's Track-A-Train use Amtrak's GPS tracking system. So fortunately if one source is down, usually the other one isn't.
jb
Thanks for that bit of info. I had noticed that sometimes one or the other wasn't up-to-date, but I didn't know why. And thanks for ASM.
When I use the abbreviation ASM, I'm referring to asm.transitdocs.com When I mention your site, which predates ASM, I use dixieland.
I assumed the OP was talking about the transidocs website since it has been stale a lot lately. I knew your site gets its data from "station check ins" whereas the other two use GPS.
My recent observation: Transitdocs loads with up to date tracking info on my phone, and then after a few minutes it reverts to a "stale feed" from Amtrak. Closing the browser and reloading the site works - some of the time. The updated tracking info is clearly there, so for some reason it's not able to communicate with the site, at least not consistently.
acelafan
Conductor
I download the live train data from Amtrak every 5 minutes for ASMAD and I have had the same problem for weeks. So it is not just a transitdocs issue. Amtrak likely has a few web servers or load balancers serving the same train data content, but one or more of the servers is out of sync.
When your web browser or transitdocs tries to contact the out-of-sync server that's when you get old or stale feeds.
Trying to get anyone Amtrak to fix it is completely frustrating and pointless because: 1) you can't find anyone in their IT department to actually talk to and 2) they don't seem to care or monitor that the data is not working properly.
When your web browser or transitdocs tries to contact the out-of-sync server that's when you get old or stale feeds.
Trying to get anyone Amtrak to fix it is completely frustrating and pointless because: 1) you can't find anyone in their IT department to actually talk to and 2) they don't seem to care or monitor that the data is not working properly.
asm.transitdocs.com has a new look.
asm.transitdocs.com
There's a menu bar with links to other info (station boards, find a specific train, etc)
If using a phone, turn it horizontally to see the color codes, and how many trains are in each color.
asm.transitdocs.com
There's a menu bar with links to other info (station boards, find a specific train, etc)
If using a phone, turn it horizontally to see the color codes, and how many trains are in each color.
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neroden
Engineer
So, I have been privy to a few insider "leaks" about such thing. Amtrak isn't happy with the current way that the third-party sites read the realtime status data (either source!) because it's bandwidth intensive. The old-line people were stodgy and wanted to either prohibit access to the information or charge for it (ridiculous), but they've finally conceded.
The current management has actually decided to switch to providing industry-standard GTFS-rt as a deliberate public feed, and is actively implementing it. As a result, they are probably not focusing too hard on maintaining the existing status server, since they're working on implementing GTFS-rt. This may account for more outages than usual.
The current management has actually decided to switch to providing industry-standard GTFS-rt as a deliberate public feed, and is actively implementing it. As a result, they are probably not focusing too hard on maintaining the existing status server, since they're working on implementing GTFS-rt. This may account for more outages than usual.
acelafan
Conductor
Hi all, asm.transitdocs.com is not my site, I'm juckins.net/asmad
I know there is a contact email address on asm.transitdocs.com for reaching out to the developer.
As Neroden said, many glitches are due to the source data having issues but we are all eager to get a better-supported public dataset from Amtrak.
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Dang, why do I keep forgetting this? Sorry.
Looks good on my Windows 10 desktop.
Opened it on my Android phone and it (I allowed) downloaded an app (shortcut?). No longer have to use the phone's browser.
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This is not good at all. When I first opened it, I got the old menu to enter a train num. & date. It then displayed the station history, but not the map with intermediate times. Then I clicked on the location details, and got the map. But I could not find any way to get back to the station history or the initial screen. The browser back arrow, doesn't work; it looks like everything is being handled with an applet. And when I closed it and tried again, it went directly to the map, which I couldn't get out of.
There's a clock icon which says it searches for a train, but after I entered the train number and selected a day on the calendar, nothing happened. The Enter key was ignored, and there was no button to continue.
ETA: I found that on the search train window, the continue button does appear when I switch the browser window to full screen. Apparently this is a control which is not being scaled to fit in the browser window and does not scroll and the bottom gets truncated.
There's a clock icon which says it searches for a train, but after I entered the train number and selected a day on the calendar, nothing happened. The Enter key was ignored, and there was no button to continue.
ETA: I found that on the search train window, the continue button does appear when I switch the browser window to full screen. Apparently this is a control which is not being scaled to fit in the browser window and does not scroll and the bottom gets truncated.
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FYI, something I did notice originally when I was trying to “return”. This icon is a map and will return to the home page.
I’m finding, on my phone that I need to rotate my phone to horizontal then back to vertical to get the menu bar to show up on some screens.
BTW, the info icon ( i in a circle ) at the top right will take you to a page that has a “contact me” link.
Please let the owner of the website know about the issues you are having.
BTW, the info icon ( i in a circle ) at the top right will take you to a page that has a “contact me” link.
Please let the owner of the website know about the issues you are having.
