Get TFL Tube data with Powershell
The London Datastore has loads of datasets available that we can use for free. One of the datasets available is a list of TFL Station Locations. The station location feed is a geo-coded KML feed of most of London Underground, DLR and London Overground stations. Here’s Powershell script that will extract this data from a url and write it to a pipe-delimited file ready for import into the database of your choice.
$xml = New-Object XML $url = "http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/syndication/feeds/stations.kml" $csvFile = "$env:UserProfile\Desktop\tfl_tubes.csv"; # Empty file if it already exists Set-Content -Path $csvFile $null; # Add headers to file Add-Content -Path $csvFile "Station|Address|Coordinates"; # Load the xml $xml.Load($url); $stations = $xml.kml.Document.Placemark; foreach($station in $stations) { $name = $station.name; $description = $station.description; $coordinates = $station.Point.coordinates # This data needs cleaning a bit $name = $name.Trim(); $description = $description.Trim(); $coordinates = $coordinates.Trim(); # Ad line to the csv file Add-Content -Path $csvFile "$name|$description|$coordinates"; } |
After running the script check your desktop for a file called tfl_tubes.csv which should look something like below.
