BOSTON (WHDH) - Those who ride the T in Massachusetts know it can be hard to keep track of where the trains are, so two men who met in Boston came up with a solution.
Griffin Van Horne and Richard Hawthorn invented the traintrackr, a light-up board that runs on Wi-Fi to track MBTA subway trains on every line in both directions in real-time.
“There’s so many people that rely on the MBTA and this is something that is beautiful that somebody would want to put on their desk or hang on their wall,” Van Horne said.
Hawthorne explained that they use the data provided to the public by the MBTA to accurately represent where the trains are through colored lights.
“People quite like to see data in this way,” he continued. “People quite like to sort of have an easy, one-shot look at what’s happening on the network.”
Consumers aren’t just buying the boards to track the T, Van Horne says some people are buying them to have a little piece of home when they move out of the city.
“Loved ones give them the boards as gifts or as a reminder of home in a way of tying them to their home city,” he said.
Hawthorne says they’ve even sold a couple of traintrackrs to MBTA employees.
“Certainly people who work for the MBTA have seen what we’re doing and I believe actually they’ve ordered two, so they’ve got in their office two of our boards sitting there,” he said.
Depending on the model, the traintrackr costs $149 or $199.
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