Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time.
I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.
The site is incomplete, and there are way, way more trains active at a given time. For instance the Tri-Rail and Brightline (high-speed rail) in Florida each have 5-6 trains running simultaneously. Brightline is notable as the US's first credible foray into high-speed rail. Similarly most major cities in the US have either light rail, rapid transit, or both, which is maybe not included in this map. "Passenger rail" might have some highly specific semantic meaning that leaves these out of this map.
Outside the northeast corridor and a few others, there are many Amtrak trains are only once a day, or less, and often with long routes. It's unfortunate. The network is pretty good in terms of coverage / states covered on the map (since it's optimized for that), but lots of places it's pretty much impractical to use because the one time/day doesn't work.
I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!
US population can be approximated as relatively dense populations in California, the Northeast, a central portion of Texas, and parts of the Midwest, with rural Europe-ish levels of density (with some greater pockets of density nestled within) in the rest of the country ~east of the Mississippi (and a lesser degree in the Pacific Northwest), and truly empty regions basically everywhere else.
In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).
It would be interesting to see a version of this for the UK, where there are approximately 24,000 train services operating every weekday. How well would it scale?
I’d kind of like real-time tracking of freight trains. There’s a BNSF grade crossing between my home and my parents’ and it would be nice to know whether I should take the 1 mile detour to get to the tunnel beneath the rail yard if there’s a train going to be blocking (I suppose it would also help to have info on the length of the trains so I’d know if the train in front of me is almost clear or if there’s another mile of train behind it).
Live data would be great, but I'd be interested even in historic data. Not like 1880s but a timeseries of 15-minute granularity of train positions for last year. It'd be interesting to see what the bottlenecks were and what other routing possibilities there could have been.
How very convenient! I'm on this map. My train is in the right position, but I don't think the name is quite right: I'm on the Silver Star but it's labelled as the Northeast Regional. Excellent project, though, thanks for posting.
This is cool, but you are missing NJ Transit which has passenger trains separate from LIRR and Metro North. You are also missing Septa and MTA internal city light rail and subway lines, which are technically passenger trains.
Yeah, I'm going to add a disclaimer about this. I've been watching the GO trains from my window this morning and they lag about a minute behind. My site grabs data on a minute interval, and I know some of the API's say they purposefully add GPS lag.
Super cool! I love this. Makes me yearn for a day when this map is way more full of activity.
Just a little feedback: the color for Amtrak and for Chicago's Metra trains are so similar it's hard to see at a glance where the Amtrak runs are amongst the many Metras that are out at a given time. Would be awesome to differentiate those marker colors a bit more.
Very cool! Didn't know this was even technically possible with the available data feeds. Great work!
Nice map for France! But it seems to include only SNCF and subsidiaries, so no RATP suburban services (RER A and RER most of B) nor partnerships operated by other companies (RENFE SNCF or DB operated by RENFE or DB).
As for Trainscanner, it looks promising, but it's a bit weird having buses show up on Trainscanner, and as the first and only option on most of the first trips in the default search (trips from Paris, today). A UX like Trainline's where it shows trains and buses in different tabs would be nicer, IMO.
I believe there was a quote from a railroad exec that Passenger rail traffic accounts for only 3% of the overall rail traffic in North America. If true, the map would be covered with Locomotives if freight was included (GP-40's are my favorite).
That would be a curious comparison point. I feel like every discussion of rail in the US always turns into pointing and laughing at how bad the US is at rail because it's viewed through a passenger lens, completely ignoring how much rail is used for freight.
My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?
Kind of underwhelming. Superb work, but the average distance between trains is, like, at least 500 miles? This is what the opposite of public transportation looks like, unfortunately.
What would that map look like if even 5% of the annual military budget of the US would be invested in trains?
Would love to see where the data's coming from -- with enough detail that I can spin up my own instance and shove the geo data in a database. (Unless you plan on making money from this, that is. The fact that you're aggregating a dozen random feeds with their own format into one schema is 100% "all the work")
I wanted to do this for ADSB data, but couldn't figure out how to get any quantity of data without paying money.
When I look at the map for UK I see far fewer trains than the map for the US. Am I missing something? I thought maybe it was because you posted earlier in the day, but your comment was posted around 0100 UTC--not that long ago. I do not think we have the best public rail system in the US but if all o had to go on was how many trains there were on each map I might think differently.
I can comment on Caltrain only, the location is available via the 511.org API.
I built a project that predicts how late trains are based on their current location vs historical averages and posts the data to Mastodon. https://caltrain.live.
A lovely map — thanks for using Leaflet and keeping that little Ukrainian flag in the corner! Probably needs an attribution for the map added too (looks like it's Carto with an OpenStreetMap-derived basemap).
Do you have any estimation of what percentage of passenger train traffic is currently displayed vs. still to be implemented? As others have mentioned, I also was little bit surprised of the (small?) amount of trains on the map.
It would be cool to see an equivalent map for freight rail.
These threads always focus on the lack of passenger rail service in the US but ignore that the US also has one of the largest, safest, and most efficient freight rail systems in the world[1]. I'd love to see it live!
Define efficient. Profitable? Maybe. Good at moving an array of goods from anywhere in the country to anywhere else? Not so good.
The Class I's and their obsession with operating ratio and PSR have strangled freight in this country for decades and pushed costs onto the public by means of increased truck traffic (and the congestion, pollution, and roadway damage that entails). Unless you're shipping bulk chemicals or coal, you're probably gonna use a truck.
I did a bit of a deep dive on this over the weekend and left feeling more confused than when I started. From what I can gather, outside of CN's holiday freight train, most of the tracking is done by community members with SDR antennas and Raspberry Pis. They report to centralized servers (which I've yet to find), and the data indicates where trains are in signalling blocks. I'm the least knowledgeable person on trains, so I don't know if this is all accurate, but that's my best understanding.
I'd love to build some sort of service that takes this data, references a DB of signaling blocks, and establishes an estimated lat/lng - but that's a huge project of its own.
It's quite hard to see those sadly due to how freight operators handle traffic - you often have to use word-of-mouth and FB groups to track them. I know there's a lot of railfans that have this data, but I'm not sure it's in a format one can actually use.
Here in India we have an app named "Where is my train?". Local people use this app a lot when traveling by train. It's not government owned either and has no ads. Just throwing in here for some inspiration since I don't know the inner workings of that app.
Edit: It uses nearby cell towers to estimate the location of train
In Finland I've been using a similar tool for years now when picking up family members from railways stations and when getting out from the station and out to the platform to board a train: https://www.vr.fi/en/live-train-tracker-map
It's incredibly more helpful than timetables (printed or online) or late train announcements and trying to find the right train names and numbers. Instead of identifying the right train, then checking the latest changes for that train on the schedule board and wondering if "3 minutes late" really means "3 minutes" you just look at the map and see, oh there's my train half way here from the previous town, I'll go have a cuppa.
There is also TRAVIC (https://travic.app) by the University of Freiburg, Germany which visualizes transit data worldwide, both live and interpolated from timetables.
It's a big part of the country's history; the project was a key bargaining chip to get BC to join Canada. Development started with the first prime minister and the actual construction was incredibly expensive and filled with controversy over bribes and exploding construction costs, causing gov turnover and bringing the federal gov into significant financial risk a few times. But they did push onward to completion and it became the core pathway for the further settlement of western Canada, which was instrumental to the country's expansion. Nowadays it's primarily a freight railway, the passenger traffic is very minimal and tickets are very expensive; it's more of a tourism attraction than practical method of passenger transport.
I took it around 5-6 years ago when I was moving to Vancouver from the east coast. It was a great way to see the country and meet some other travellers - such a strange travel option attracts some interesting folks!
The highlight though is the Jasper-Vancouver leg going through the Rockies - if you don’t have 3 days to burn that’s a good choice. Rocky Mountaineer line goes through there as well iirc.
I took Via east to west a while back. It takes a few days, but just like Amtrak the regular seats are more spacious and comfortable than airplane seats so it's not too bad. No internet most of the way, so you better have some books or something to entertain yourself. The food is terrible because of course it is. Bring snacks. The train also stops for a couple hours in Winnipeg which has lots of places to get a good feed.
The scenery is pretty great, especially through northern Ontario where it feels like you are traveling through an alien planet where the only thing that exists are rocks, trees and eerie, pitch-black pools of liquid that you could imagine isn't water. You fall asleep at night then wake up the next morning and the view out the window is exactly the same. It's wild.
Crossing the Rockies isn't really worth it if you're only going for the views, imo. Lots of tourists get on the train at Jasper, but I imagine they'll be disappointed because the epic vistas are fleeting and most of the time your line of sight is blocked by trees, cliffs or tunnels. Unlike the route out of Denver on Amtrak, you don't get an awesome desert on the other side either.
Either way, the main point is that it's pretty much the only way to get from one side of Canada to the other if you don't want to use a plane or zig-zag through the US. Greyhound is gone, STC is gone, stringing together a bus route with a hodge podge of local operators is tough and in some places just leads you back up to Via anyway. If you're lucky enough to live along the CN line then Via is all there is, and it's better than nothing at all, which is the situation for a huge chunk of rural Canada.
Busses would be soo much better if there was real time location of busses and trains that you could view on a map. Probably the lowest hanging fruit to pick for public transport improvement.
Really cool idea. Would be neat to also be able to click railways as well. I think openrailwaymap provides some cool details like owner, max speed, electrification.
I also noticed the map makes it look like the trains are travelling slightly south of the track. It seems to converge once you zoom in though, so I think the data is probably accurate, but somehow the map is distorting things.
This is really cool and I've already found a couple of lines that went further than I realized. This is going to make me use trains more!
On that note, one feature that would be really helpful is if I selected a particular train, that it would show me where the stations are on that line. Maybe the train company would even give you a commission if I clicked through and bought a ticket.
I love it! I made a mashup of video feeds and live train locations to show you video feeds from trains that are about to show up: https://train.api.connelly.casa/
This gives me lots of ideas of additional agencies to include! Maybe we should join forces :)
What was behind the decision to include just commuter rail and long-distance passenger rail, but not local rapid transit? Is it a resource issue drawing that many vehicles? I love this map, but I'd love to see it with more modes of transport.
mostly just because this was a weekend project and I needed to draw the line somewhere. I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I reckon it'll take a good amount more time.
Nice project. It looks like there are a couple of map layers? Because if you look at Truckee, California (near Reno), it looks like you have two text blocks trying to both show Truckee.
I don't think it's working properly. Most (if not all?) trains are going at around 40-20 km/h. Why would they all stop in the middle of nowhere like this ?
Slow orders abound on US freight roads. This time of year maintenance of way crews are being cut off to protect budgets and only the bare minimum of maintenance is being done until after the first of the year when the crews will be brought back.
Was it an in-service passenger train? A freight train or out-of-service passenger train wouldn't show up.
Sadly, there's very little data available for most trains on US rails. For example, there's no way (AFAIK) to see what freight trains are active on the network. It's a little frustrating in comparison with how rich our air traffic sources are.
If anyone on HN knows of any richer sources for train network data, please let me know. I'm highly interested!
There's also lots of track included that hasn't seen passenger trains in 30-50 years. The only passenger rail in Idaho is in the panhandle. I'm not sure if Helena has any passenger traffic either.
All the passengers routes I was on as a child are gone, replaced by industrial transport.
Used to be able to get to a lot of places - at least on the West Coast (ie Vancouver to Prince George, Vancouver to Calgary etc).
I know the Royal Hudson (BC coast, Vancouver to Whistler (at least) retired years ago and is a museum just in Squamish. I rode that one as a child, too...
It does look like this is missing the West Coast Express in the Lower Mainland - but that’s strictly a commuter service with a number of trains into Vancouver in the morning, and out of Vancouver in the evening.
High speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles isn't economically viable. California HSR will cost at least $30 billion to construct and California's own estimates claim it will cost $700-$874 million per year to operate.[1] Around four million passengers fly between SF and LA every year. Assuming every single one of them takes the train instead of flying, you're looking at $175-$218 per ticket just to pay for operations. If you wanted the project to pay for itself in 20 years, you'd have to charge $550-$600 per ticket. For comparison, airfare between the two cities starts at $80 round trip. Also the train will take 3 hours while flying takes 1.5 hours. Even including the time it takes to get to/from the airport and get through security, flying is faster.
The Shinkansen is FASCINATING.
I recently went and was amazed by Tokyo's infrastructure and how they have a city under a city.
The fact that there is a bullet train at tokyo station every 10 mins or so is mind blowing
I went into a Youtube rabbit hole the other night...
I like the Shinkansen but it's also very expensive - that journey is ¥14,170 one way, and the discounts for return tickets or advance booking are vanishingly small. Even with the incredibly weak yen I can see same-day SF-LA flights cheaper than that.
I just spent the summer traveling Europe, visited 17 cities where 14 were by rail. 3 were day trips.
Got so used to how easy it it to literally walk into a station and be on a train in a few minutes that I almost missed Turin->Paris when a tram to the station was five minutes behind schedule. Average connection was 5 hours of travel time, but factoring in getting to/from the airport, early arrival, etc, it was mostly a wash in any time saved. All in all, total cost for transport was about $900 (not including going/coming back from Europe, which obviously exceeded that).
Would you please add an OpenStreetMap attribution[0]? It looks like you're using OSM data via OpenRailwayMap (which also requires its own attribution[1]) and Carto basemaps (which I'm not terribly familiar with, but at first glance appear to be based on OSM data[2])---each of which detail their respective attribution requirements.
Leaflet makes this incredibly simple; just add the suggested text to the attribution field when you initialize the layers:
L.tileLayer('https://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/light_all/{z}/{x}/{y}{r}.png', {
maxZoom: 19,
attribution: '' // here!
}).addTo(map);
var railwayOverlay = L.tileLayer('https://{s}.tiles.openrailwaymap.org/standard/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
attribution: '', // and here!
}).addTo(map);
I'm not actually sure what the solution you're proposing is?
Even if you completely eliminated air travel (with no replacement - which is not realistic), you'd just reduce emissions by a mere 2%. Not a trivial number given the scale, but it's far from a "solution to our climate problem". (For comparison, the larger transportation sector including cars is is 16% of emissions. Cars alone are 12%.) [1]
It also turns out to be a very hard problem to solve. We don't have the tech to build an electric airliner yet, and given how hard it's been just to get a single high-speed rail line from SF to LA I'm not betting trains are going to be in a place to practically replace aviation in the US anytime in the next few decades.
>If we're looking for some low hanging fruit around how to possibly lower CO2 emissions, well folks here it is.
I'm not really sure how you can call it "low hanging fruit" when its overall contribution to global emissions is only 2%, and how hard it is to build HSR projects in the US.
Most of the states are too big to be economical. I think the biggest disappointment with US rail is that it doesn't get enough trucks off the highway. There should be no reason for trucks to venture more than a couple hundred miles from the nearest rail terminal. Not only is it wasteful, but it's more dangerous having trucks driving across the entire country.
Speed would be nice, but speed is not the problem. If the trains just ran on time, 50mph would be just fine. The problem with Amtrak is frequent multiple-hour delays that stack up. The schedule is totally unpredictable.
HSR only makes economic sense in the northeast. Everywhere else is too spread out for rail to compete with air travel. The most popular air route in the western US (SF-LA) isn’t worth making high speed rail between. The project is expected to cost over $30 billion. Assuming 100% of air passengers use rail (4 million per year), at $150 per ticket it would take 50 years to break even… and that assumes zero maintenance costs. Also it would be slower than taking a plane.
The train situation in the USofA is depressing on so many more levels than just speed. Availability is even worse. I'm in Dallas, but to get to Denver, I have to go to Chicago first and involves a >2 hour bus ride along the way. WTF?
it already has something much more sophisticated - a high-speed air network
think your train is efficient? a plane can fly in a straight line between any two points in the US! beat that! ever see a train cross one of the great lakes? no challenge for a plane! rerouting a rail line can cost billions...but only a tiny bit of fuel to reroute a plane...not to mention I can go coast to coast in five hours on a plane but the world's fastest train would take much longer...
For Austria you can see them all here: https://anachb.vor.at/ ("Kartenoptionen" -> "Livemap" -> "Alle einblenden"). Even covers buses, subways, trams and local trains as well as public transport ships.
kylecazar|2 years ago
I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.
condiment|2 years ago
tacostakohashi|2 years ago
I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!
ska|2 years ago
jcranmer|2 years ago
In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).
bonestamp2|2 years ago
screye|2 years ago
I'm surprised anyone takes it at all.
US rail is starting at negative 100. Only a small group of masochists (raises hand) choose to inflict this on themselves.
Reason077|2 years ago
The data is available and open!
gnulinux|2 years ago
dhosek|2 years ago
eskibars|2 years ago
epaulson|2 years ago
callalex|2 years ago
tonymet|2 years ago
howenterprisey|2 years ago
jokteur|2 years ago
orangewindies|2 years ago
UK (not a map, similar view to what the signallers see): https://traksy.uk/live/M+58+STIRLNG
caf|2 years ago
(although it also includes some buses and ferries, and you can only look at one region at a time)
thriftwy|2 years ago
Yandex has it for (mostly Russian) trains that it has on schedule.
markus92|2 years ago
ecshafer|2 years ago
CryptoBanker|2 years ago
saltminer|2 years ago
pcdsl|2 years ago
seedless-sensat|2 years ago
ryry|2 years ago
hardcopy|2 years ago
cattown|2 years ago
Just a little feedback: the color for Amtrak and for Chicago's Metra trains are so similar it's hard to see at a glance where the Amtrak runs are amongst the many Metras that are out at a given time. Would be awesome to differentiate those marker colors a bit more.
Very cool! Didn't know this was even technically possible with the available data feeds. Great work!
ryry|2 years ago
gadcam|2 years ago
sofixa|2 years ago
As for Trainscanner, it looks promising, but it's a bit weird having buses show up on Trainscanner, and as the first and only option on most of the first trips in the default search (trips from Paris, today). A UX like Trainline's where it shows trains and buses in different tabs would be nicer, IMO.
mritzmann|2 years ago
kingsloi|2 years ago
Southshore Line - connecting Chicago, IL (Millennium Station) to South Bend, IN, via East Chicago, Gary, Chesterton, etc
ryry|2 years ago
reactordev|2 years ago
noirbot|2 years ago
My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?
firebaze|2 years ago
What would that map look like if even 5% of the annual military budget of the US would be invested in trains?
Readerium|2 years ago
You will be baffled by the amount of trains.
loxias|2 years ago
Would love to see where the data's coming from -- with enough detail that I can spin up my own instance and shove the geo data in a database. (Unless you plan on making money from this, that is. The fact that you're aggregating a dozen random feeds with their own format into one schema is 100% "all the work")
I wanted to do this for ADSB data, but couldn't figure out how to get any quantity of data without paying money.
vzaliva|2 years ago
https://www.map.signalbox.io/
dfc|2 years ago
sz4kerto|2 years ago
http://vonatinfo.mav-start.hu/
Pretty cool, it's a shame that the actual (state-owned) trainlines are in shambles.
s9g|2 years ago
Which is a shame, because I actually worked on a live train map internally when I was an intern there a decade ago.
svarlamov|2 years ago
klinquist|2 years ago
I built a project that predicts how late trains are based on their current location vs historical averages and posts the data to Mastodon. https://caltrain.live.
ryry|2 years ago
I did a quick write up about it here: https://rydercalmdown.com/projects/trains-fyi/
The hardest part was learning about GTFS-RT, which was a data format I wasn't familiar with until now.
mourner|2 years ago
ryry|2 years ago
NelsonMinar|2 years ago
niemenmaa|2 years ago
Do you have any estimation of what percentage of passenger train traffic is currently displayed vs. still to be implemented? As others have mentioned, I also was little bit surprised of the (small?) amount of trains on the map.
Similar map for Finnish trains: https://www.vr.fi/en/live-train-tracker-map
PeterStuer|2 years ago
Here's the map for Belgium btw https://trainmap.belgiantrain.be/
quartz|2 years ago
These threads always focus on the lack of passenger rail service in the US but ignore that the US also has one of the largest, safest, and most efficient freight rail systems in the world[1]. I'd love to see it live!
https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-r...
wpm|2 years ago
The Class I's and their obsession with operating ratio and PSR have strangled freight in this country for decades and pushed costs onto the public by means of increased truck traffic (and the congestion, pollution, and roadway damage that entails). Unless you're shipping bulk chemicals or coal, you're probably gonna use a truck.
ryry|2 years ago
I'd love to build some sort of service that takes this data, references a DB of signaling blocks, and establishes an estimated lat/lng - but that's a huge project of its own.
toomuchtodo|2 years ago
https://atcsmon.software.informer.com/
https://www.rail.watch/rwmon.html
ZanyProgrammer|2 years ago
carbotaniuman|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
anjel|2 years ago
GauntletWizard|2 years ago
phyphy|2 years ago
Edit: It uses nearby cell towers to estimate the location of train
Dharmaaa|2 years ago
yason|2 years ago
It's incredibly more helpful than timetables (printed or online) or late train announcements and trying to find the right train names and numbers. Instead of identifying the right train, then checking the latest changes for that train on the schedule board and wondering if "3 minutes late" really means "3 minutes" you just look at the map and see, oh there's my train half way here from the previous town, I'll go have a cuppa.
Kon-Peki|2 years ago
https://www.transitchicago.com/developers/traintracker/
com1|2 years ago
thomasahle|2 years ago
chrisfosterelli|2 years ago
dewert|2 years ago
But it's pretty famous - we even have a song about it! [1]
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Railroad_Trilogy
a3c9|2 years ago
The highlight though is the Jasper-Vancouver leg going through the Rockies - if you don’t have 3 days to burn that’s a good choice. Rocky Mountaineer line goes through there as well iirc.
alisonatwork|2 years ago
The scenery is pretty great, especially through northern Ontario where it feels like you are traveling through an alien planet where the only thing that exists are rocks, trees and eerie, pitch-black pools of liquid that you could imagine isn't water. You fall asleep at night then wake up the next morning and the view out the window is exactly the same. It's wild.
Crossing the Rockies isn't really worth it if you're only going for the views, imo. Lots of tourists get on the train at Jasper, but I imagine they'll be disappointed because the epic vistas are fleeting and most of the time your line of sight is blocked by trees, cliffs or tunnels. Unlike the route out of Denver on Amtrak, you don't get an awesome desert on the other side either.
Either way, the main point is that it's pretty much the only way to get from one side of Canada to the other if you don't want to use a plane or zig-zag through the US. Greyhound is gone, STC is gone, stringing together a bus route with a hodge podge of local operators is tough and in some places just leads you back up to Via anyway. If you're lucky enough to live along the CN line then Via is all there is, and it's better than nothing at all, which is the situation for a huge chunk of rural Canada.
monlockandkey|2 years ago
jrockway|2 years ago
The CTA has this: https://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/wireless/html/eta.jsp?...
Those are the only two cities I've lived in, but the ability to track buses seems widespread to me.
achileas|2 years ago
[0] https://www.mbta.com/developers/v3-api/streaming
Lammy|2 years ago
ryry|2 years ago
hexane360|2 years ago
ryry|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
matthewbauer|2 years ago
I also noticed the map makes it look like the trains are travelling slightly south of the track. It seems to converge once you zoom in though, so I think the data is probably accurate, but somehow the map is distorting things.
bonestamp2|2 years ago
On that note, one feature that would be really helpful is if I selected a particular train, that it would show me where the stations are on that line. Maybe the train company would even give you a commission if I clicked through and bought a ticket.
eskibars|2 years ago
This gives me lots of ideas of additional agencies to include! Maybe we should join forces :)
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
Galacta7|2 years ago
ryry|2 years ago
I'll add them to the list and investigate; thanks!
divbzero|2 years ago
For US inter-city rail there is also Amtrak’s official Track Your Train: https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html
achileas|2 years ago
ryry|2 years ago
jmspring|2 years ago
aFrenchy|2 years ago
Fiahil|2 years ago
plowjockey|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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jmac01|2 years ago
Symbiote|2 years ago
TheArcane|2 years ago
_whiteCaps_|2 years ago
mkj|2 years ago
sneed_chucker|2 years ago
Because it doesn't seem to show the active passenger light rail systems in several cities and metro areas.
nittanymount|2 years ago
I just drove by a train station, one train passed by, not on this map, haha
naberhausj|2 years ago
Sadly, there's very little data available for most trains on US rails. For example, there's no way (AFAIK) to see what freight trains are active on the network. It's a little frustrating in comparison with how rich our air traffic sources are.
If anyone on HN knows of any richer sources for train network data, please let me know. I'm highly interested!
s-xyz|2 years ago
arrowleaf|2 years ago
ionwake|2 years ago
FalconSensei|2 years ago
teunispeters|2 years ago
I know the Royal Hudson (BC coast, Vancouver to Whistler (at least) retired years ago and is a museum just in Squamish. I rode that one as a child, too...
bpye|2 years ago
geniium|2 years ago
flockonus|2 years ago
hnthrowaway0315|2 years ago
alienreborn|2 years ago
ryry|2 years ago
MBCook|2 years ago
benwerd|2 years ago
But not much more, and it makes me so sad that we undervalue real public transportation here. I wish we could do better.
Still! This is something! And this website is cool!
albert180|2 years ago
eclo|2 years ago
nilsbunger|2 years ago
I was just in Japan, and took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, which is a similar distance as SF to LA.
That train:
- runs every 10 minutes -- if you miss one, just take the next one!
- takes 2.5 hours travel time
- starts and ends in city centers on both ends.
- has better legroom and wider seats than economy
- free, fast Wifi on board, your cell signal still works, and you can use your computer the whole trip.
- has no security or boarding hassle. You can show up 5 minutes before departure and just get on.
- has no luggage limitations AFAICT
It's faster and far less stressful than flying SF to LA, with the security and boarding hassles, Ubers on both ends, and cramped onboard conditions.
chroma|2 years ago
1. https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/san_jose...
picohen|2 years ago
I went into a Youtube rabbit hole the other night...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdJwAUdvlik
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFpG3yf3Rxk
lmm|2 years ago
hifromLA|2 years ago
brandall10|2 years ago
Got so used to how easy it it to literally walk into a station and be on a train in a few minutes that I almost missed Turin->Paris when a tram to the station was five minutes behind schedule. Average connection was 5 hours of travel time, but factoring in getting to/from the airport, early arrival, etc, it was mostly a wash in any time saved. All in all, total cost for transport was about $900 (not including going/coming back from Europe, which obviously exceeded that).
mbb70|2 years ago
resolutebat|2 years ago
vinniepukh|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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chandlerswift|2 years ago
Leaflet makes this incredibly simple; just add the suggested text to the attribution field when you initialize the layers:
[0]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap/API
[2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P7bhSE-N9iegI398QYDjKeVhnbS... via https://carto.com/legal
unknown|2 years ago
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elhospitaler|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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Tiktaalik|2 years ago
https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1729195110888620057?s=20
If we're looking for some low hanging fruit around how to possibly lower CO2 emissions, well folks here it is.
The solutions to our climate problem have been staring us in the face since the 1900s.
tjohns|2 years ago
Even if you completely eliminated air travel (with no replacement - which is not realistic), you'd just reduce emissions by a mere 2%. Not a trivial number given the scale, but it's far from a "solution to our climate problem". (For comparison, the larger transportation sector including cars is is 16% of emissions. Cars alone are 12%.) [1]
It also turns out to be a very hard problem to solve. We don't have the tech to build an electric airliner yet, and given how hard it's been just to get a single high-speed rail line from SF to LA I'm not betting trains are going to be in a place to practically replace aviation in the US anytime in the next few decades.
[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
gruez|2 years ago
I'm not really sure how you can call it "low hanging fruit" when its overall contribution to global emissions is only 2%, and how hard it is to build HSR projects in the US.
[1] https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/aviation
>In 2022 aviation accounted for 2% of global energy-related CO2 emissions
kouru225|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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gpvos|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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h1fra|2 years ago
gosub100|2 years ago
stickfigure|2 years ago
chroma|2 years ago
thallium205|2 years ago
dylan604|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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oldpersonintx|2 years ago
think your train is efficient? a plane can fly in a straight line between any two points in the US! beat that! ever see a train cross one of the great lakes? no challenge for a plane! rerouting a rail line can cost billions...but only a tiny bit of fuel to reroute a plane...not to mention I can go coast to coast in five hours on a plane but the world's fastest train would take much longer...
afhammad|2 years ago
https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/ https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/schematic/
unknown|2 years ago
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the_mitsuhiko|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
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miki_tyler|2 years ago
Coincidence...??? I think not!
sea-gold|2 years ago