The departure board · NYC subway, read live
The next train.
Read properly.
Pick any of the subway’s 496 stations and the board fills with the next trains through it — uptown one side, downtown the other, each with its route bullet, where it is going, and how many minutes away it is. The countdowns are the MTA’s own: the same real-time feed the platform clocks run on, fetched by this page and decoded by its own hand, every thirty seconds.
No key, no account, no server in the middle. The MTA publishes its countdown feeds openly; the station register is the authority’s own list, carried whole. The page remembers your station, and a link to the board carries the station with it.
496 stations · 24 routes · 8 live feeds · the MTA’s own countdowns · decoded in your browser
The board
Every station. Both directions.
Name a station — or a route, or a borough — and take your pick. The board refreshes itself while you watch, says when it last read the wire, and a press of the button reads it again on the spot.
Departures
waiting for the wire
Uptown
Downtown
Not read yet.
The map
The system, drawn from the register.
Four hundred and ninety-six dots, one per station, placed by the register’s own coordinates and inked by route — no map tiles, no library, just the canvas. Click a dot and the board reads that station.
System map
The dot with the ring is the station on the board.
About
A board, not an app.
The countdowns are the MTA’s GTFS-realtime feeds — the same predictions the platform clocks show — published without a key and read here directly. They arrive as protocol buffers; this page carries its own small decoder rather than a library, and what you see is what the authority said, seconds ago. A train’s destination is read off its own trip, not a timetable.
The station register is the MTA’s Stations list on New York State’s open-data portal, carried whole: all 496 stations with their routes, boroughs, platform direction labels and coordinates. Stations that share a complex share a board, the way they share a fare gate. The three shuttles are shown as the S they wear on the platform.
What the feed does not say, the board does not invent. A station whose routes are asleep says so; a feed that will not answer is reported as exactly that; and nothing here is a schedule — it is what is on the rails right now. Your chosen station is remembered in this browser and nowhere else.