Transport for Belgium

About Transport for Belgium

iRail is an API providing access to Belgian railway schedule data, covering stations, liveboards, connections, vehicles, train composition, occupancy, and disturbances. The API is available at api.irail.be, requires TLS 1.1 or higher, and supports JSON and XML response formats along with conditional GET requests via ETag and Cache-Control headers for caching.

Requests are limited to 3 per second per source IP address, with a burst allowance of 5 additional requests. Applications are asked to set a user-agent header identifying the application and a contact method; without one, an IP exceeding request limits may be blocked without prior warning. Objects such as stations, vehicles, and departures are identified by stable URIs (e.g. http://irail.be/stations/NMBS/008814001) rather than composed by the client.

The documentation is aimed at developers building applications on top of Belgian railway data. Bug reports for the API and documentation are handled through separate GitHub repositories, and a station list is also available as a CSV in a dedicated GitHub repo along with Node.js conversion scripts.

Key features

• Query Belgian railway stations, liveboards, connections, and vehicles
• Retrieve real-time train composition data
• Retrieve current disturbances on the rail network
• URI-based identifiers for stations, vehicles, and departures
• Supports conditional GET requests with ETag and Cache-Control caching
• JSON and XML response formats

Frequently asked questions