🚂 Irish Rail Realtime Scraper

🚀 Export live Irish Rail train positions and status from the Irish Rail public XML API in seconds. From the public Irish Rail source to spreadsheet, JSON, JSONL, XML, RSS, or HTML.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-06-05 · 📊 10 fields per record · Public Irish Rail data · Real-time

The Irish Rail Realtime Scraper turns the Irish Rail public endpoint into a clean, structured dataset. It pulls live Irish Rail train positions and status from the Irish Rail public XML API, normalizes the fields, and pushes one row per record.

Coverage is whatever Irish Rail publishes on the public endpoint at the moment you run the actor. No login, no API key, no scraping tricks. Just clean data, ready for analysis.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
📊 Analysts	Pull a fresh snapshot for dashboards
🛠️ Developers	Mirror the feed into your own database
📰 Journalists	Verify facts quickly without writing client code
🤖 ML engineers	Build training sets from the public feed
🏢 Operations teams	Monitor changes over time
🎓 Researchers	Use the data for academic studies

📋 What the Irish Rail Realtime Scraper does

• Calls the public Irish Rail endpoint and parses the response.
• Flattens the data into one row per record with clean field names.
• Surfaces upstream errors as a single record with the error field set, so your pipeline does not crash.
• Lets you cap the output with maxItems for cheap previews.
• Streams results to the Apify dataset for instant export.

💡 Why it matters: Public feeds change shape and field names constantly. This actor gives you a stable, documented schema your downstream tooling can rely on.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon.

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
maxItems	integer	No	Free users: 10. Paid users: up to 1,000,000. Prefill: 10.
direction	string	No	Optional direction filter.

Example input:

{
  "maxItems": 10
}

⚠️ Good to Know: This actor depends on the public Irish Rail endpoint. If the upstream is rate-limiting or temporarily unavailable, the actor pushes a single record with the error field populated. Re-run later.

📊 Output

Each record is a flat object. The error field is always last.

Field	Type	Description
🚂 Train Code trainCode	string	Train code.
🚦 Status status	string	Train status.
📍 Lat lat	number	Latitude.
📍 Lon lon	number	Longitude.
📢 Public Message publicMessage	string	Public-facing message.
🧭 Direction direction	string	Direction.
⏱️ Late Minutes lateMinutes	number	Minutes late.
📅 Train Date trainDate	string	Date of the train run.
🕒 scrapedAt	string	When this row was fetched.
❌ error	string	Set if the upstream response was an error.

Sample record:

{
  "trainCode": "",
  "status": "",
  "lat": 0,
  "lon": 0,
  "publicMessage": "",
  "direction": "",
  "lateMinutes": 0,
  "trainDate": "",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-05T12:00:00.000Z",
  "error": null
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

| 🆓 | Works on the free Apify tier with no Irish Rail account required. | | 🧹 | Clean, snake-friendly field names ready for BI tools. | | 🛟 | Surfaces upstream rate-limit and error responses as a clean record instead of crashing. | | 🔌 | Zero setup. Click run, get data. | | 💾 | Push to dataset for instant spreadsheet, JSON, JSONL, XML, RSS, or HTML export. | | ⚡ | Lightweight. No browser, no heavy dependencies. |

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Setup time	Clean fields?	Error handling?
Roll your own fetch	30 min +	❌	❌
Generic RSS reader	5 min	partial	❌
This Actor	5 sec, no install	✅	✅

🚀 How to use

1. Click Try for free.
2. Adjust any filters in the input form (defaults are fine for a first run).
3. Click Start. Your dataset is ready in seconds. Download as spreadsheet, JSON, JSONL, XML, RSS, or HTML, or pipe to your warehouse.

💼 Business use cases

📊 Operational dashboards. Pull a fresh snapshot every few minutes and feed your status board.

🤖 ML feature engineering. Build a clean training set from the public feed for downstream modelling.

📰 Newsroom fact-checking. Reporters can grab a verified snapshot in seconds, no specialist tool needed.

🏢 Compliance and audit. Keep a tamper-evident log of what the upstream source said, when.

🔌 Automating Irish Rail Realtime Scraper

• Make / Zapier: trigger this actor on a schedule, push results to Airtable, Google Sheets, or Slack.
• Cron schedule: native Apify scheduler.
• Webhooks: get a POST to your endpoint the moment a run finishes.
• Pipe to BigQuery / Snowflake / Postgres: native Apify integrations move datasets straight into your warehouse.

🌟 Beyond business use cases

🎓 Education. Teach a class using a real-time public feed instead of a stale textbook dataset.

🧪 Personal research. Track changes over time for whatever you find interesting.

🤝 Non-profit and open data. Build public dashboards without writing client code.

🧰 Tinkering and prototyping. Spin up a clean feed in 5 seconds to test a new tool or pipeline idea.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Paste this README into ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant and ask it to map your workflow to the actor's inputs. The schema, examples, and field list above contain everything an LLM needs to design a working pipeline.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

❓ Do I need an account with Irish Rail? No. This actor uses the public endpoint only.

❓ Is this scraping or API? It is a thin wrapper over the public Irish Rail endpoint, normalised for downstream tools.

❓ Will the schema change? The documented fields are stable. New fields from upstream are passed through as-is.

❓ How fresh is the data? As fresh as Irish Rail publishes it. The actor reads live every run.

❓ What happens during a rate-limit? The actor pushes a single record with the error field populated instead of crashing.

❓ Can I schedule runs? Yes, use the Apify scheduler or hook into Make, Zapier, or cron.

❓ How do I cap the cost of a test run? Set maxItems to a small number, such as 5 or 10.

❓ What format can I download? Spreadsheet, JSON, JSONL, XML, RSS, or HTML straight from the Apify dataset UI.

❓ Is the data accurate? It mirrors what Irish Rail publishes. Any inaccuracy upstream will be mirrored downstream.

❓ Can I run it from my own code? Yes, every Apify actor exposes a REST API and SDK clients in popular languages.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Apify ships native integrations with Make, Zapier, Slack, Discord, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Gmail, Airbyte, Keboola, Telegram, GitHub, and any REST API or webhook endpoint. Trigger runs from a calendar event, a form submission, a cron job, or pipe results straight into BigQuery, Snowflake, or a Postgres warehouse.

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