for fun I looked into how to process amtrak train location data. turns out they have no truly public api, but there are public endpoints with obfuscated data. fortunately, people have reverse engineered it (https://github.com/mgwalker/amtrak-api) which is why there are unofficial trackers out there. I translated some of the code into scheme using the industria/hashing libraries for hmac-sha-1 hashing and aes-cbc encryption. didn't see a readily available pbkdf2 scheme library so I rolled my own. took some fiddling but it's working!
here's what a snapshot of an acela from dc to boston looks like: https://gist.github.com/davexunit/5210776b7a47c39021cd7059ef0e1340
dave
npub1rw…6jm6v
2025-04-13 17:44:55 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1rw3ux8q2c2spvxus80n5az5nhty728mgkgd2tnz78dhez58fj03sl6jm6vSeen on
wss://relay.ditto.pubPublished at
2025-04-13 17:44:55 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "6c0efff000e2970ade2ebe4ad9ee254e16f9e62918721e592c02e324e07d3d48",
"pubkey": "1ba3c31c0ac2a0161b903be74e8a93bac9e51f68b21aa5cc5e3b6f9150e993e3",
"created_at": 1744566295,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"proxy",
"https://toot.cat/users/dthompson/statuses/114331896738711818",
"activitypub"
],
[
"client",
"Mostr",
"31990:6be38f8c63df7dbf84db7ec4a6e6fbbd8d19dca3b980efad18585c46f04b26f9:mostr",
"wss://relay.mostr.pub"
]
],
"content": "for fun I looked into how to process amtrak train location data. turns out they have no truly public api, but there are public endpoints with obfuscated data. fortunately, people have reverse engineered it (https://github.com/mgwalker/amtrak-api) which is why there are unofficial trackers out there. I translated some of the code into scheme using the industria/hashing libraries for hmac-sha-1 hashing and aes-cbc encryption. didn't see a readily available pbkdf2 scheme library so I rolled my own. took some fiddling but it's working!\n\nhere's what a snapshot of an acela from dc to boston looks like: https://gist.github.com/davexunit/5210776b7a47c39021cd7059ef0e1340",
"sig": "4eab6e3aea985651468a9f7d60a295cf904159cafba36e371a0f7bf670ff5b5196b2e41340593bcb9fedc6d837d185aa5666bba544b6d8937f6040759eccd2f1"
}