Welcome to the Disorient Express

We're back in business! (see the news section)

New York City's Subway system can be mystifying at times, especially when it seems like certain trains like to suddenly stop running, go a different route or just start skipping stops for no apparent reason. G Train, I'm talking to you.

So after a lot of frustration about never knowing which lines were going to be out when, I figured the only thing to do was to cobble together a system to build RSS and TXT feeds of subway outages. Makes sense to me. I hope you find it useful and if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to email me.

Important Note

These feeds are updated on friday, just like the MTA's service advisories... Also, there may end up being some weird gibberish in there because the MTAs pages aren't exactly the easiest to draw information from. So that said, your mileage may vary.

Better RSS and other fun things coming soon.

News:

2/23/06 - WE'RE BACK! Unfortunately due to bad HTML, some shoddy programming on our part and a lack of time to get everything back up and kicking, these feeds have been out of date for, oh, about a year and change now. But no more, dammit! With some new code under the hood and a mean spirit spurred by getting screwed by the E/V train last weekend, the site and its feeds are now back and kicking. Please contact me if you have any questions or ideas on how we can improve this and please spread the word to let folks know that this is back up. Thanks!

3/5/04 - Thanks to a heads up from Locutus, a few misbehaving feeds (including the much-abused L train) are now kicking along wonderfully. Sorry for any problems, getting stranded in the middle of the night etc. that may have happened as a result. Blame the MTA for writing lousy HTML. We also bid a fond farewell to the Q Diamond train as it fades off into memory.

12/12/03 - The MTA decided to redo the HTML code for their service updates (to make it worse, oddly) which meant that updates were a little shaky for a week or two there. I appologize for any problems this caused. Looks like after a little rewriting we're back up and kicking though. If you notice anything weird, please contact me below.

10/15/03 - Wow, 800 something visits in the first two days this little thing's been running. Thanks to everyone for stopping by. Also, because anything mostly worth doing is worth really overdoing, there are now HTML feeds of each line's info, suitable for syncing with your pda through plucker or avantgo. Cheers to Matt for the inspiration.

Sign Up For Updates

This thing is a work in progress (clearly). If you're interested in hearing when we do something new and exciting with the thing, just sign up below.


Thanks

Big thanks to Mobius for making the thing look far fancier than it deserves and getting the word out. Thanks to all the people who linked to or wrote about this little thing. Finally thanks to the busted ass trains of the MTA for making this whole thing neccessary.

Contact Me (suggestions more than welcome!)

Some Resources:

Straphangers Campaign
NYC Bloggers
 nycsubway.org
Subway Rules