Bealach

Ireland's trains and buses, live on a map.

Bealach (Irish for "way" or "route", said BAL-ukh) shows every Irish Rail, DART and commuter train moving right now, with how late it's running, where it was last seen and its next stop. Add a free NTA key and over a thousand Dublin Bus, Bus Éireann and Go-Ahead buses appear too, along with every Luas tram.

• Live positions refreshed every 20 seconds, gliding from one report to the next so you can see which train went where.
• Delays at a glance. Each train shows minutes late or early, its last station and next stop. The list view sorts the most delayed first.
• Search by train code, route number or station: "Cork", "E868", "46A".
• Follow a train to keep it centred as it moves, and share a link straight to it (?v=train:A807).
• Light, dark or system appearance, with a matching map.
• Every state handled: loading, no trains overnight, a delayed feed, and the feed being down, with the last good positions kept on screen.
• Accessible: the list view gives a text alternative to the map, mode colours are colour-blind safe and always paired with a label, and gliding turns off with reduced motion.

Bus positions are GPS, refreshed about every 30 seconds; buses that haven't reported for 10 minutes are hidden. Irish Rail reports where each train last checked in, usually a station, rather than GPS.

Luas trams don't publish their location at all. NTA's trip updates do give each tram's delay, so Bealach takes the timetable, shifts it by that delay, and places the tram between the two stops it should be between right now. Tram cards say their position is estimated. Trains therefore move in hops between stations, and Bealach glides them along so the motion is easy to follow.

• /api/trains and /api/buses fetch the upstream feeds and return a compact list of vehicles. Responses are cached on the CDN for 15–20 seconds, so every visitor shares one upstream request. A slow or failed upstream serves the last copy instead of blocking.
• NTA's rate limit is about 3 calls a minute per key, shared across feeds, so lib/nta.ts calls buses every 45 seconds and Luas every 90 at most per server, shares in-flight requests, honours Retry-After, and serves the last good copy if NTA says no.
• The timetable is the national GTFS zip, about 150 MB. Before each build, scripts/update-routes.mjs reads route names and destinations, and scripts/update-luas.mjs streams stop_times.txt (450 MB unzipped) keeping only Luas rows. Both use HTTP range requests, so nothing else is downloaded. If either fails, the committed snapshot in data/ is used.
• The map is MapLibre GL. Its page code and web worker must be the exact same build, so both are served unbundled from public/maplibre/<version>/ (copied on install by scripts/copy-maplibre.mjs).

npm install
npm run dev

Buses and Luas need an NTA key: register at developer.nationaltransport.ie, subscribe to the GTFS-R API, and set it as NTA_API_KEY (in .env.local, or in your host's environment variables). No rebuild is needed; buses appear on the next page load. Node 20+.

AGPL-3.0. You can use, modify and self-host Bealach freely. If you run a modified version as a public service, you must share its source code under the same licence.

Sister projects: Glyphyard (self-hosted Google Fonts) and Spillcheck (see every third party a website talks to).