I am going to sleep now because it is pretty late in Norway and I can sense that I will have a very long work day tomorrow. It is crazy to see that World Train Map is on the front page. Holy shit!
Please give feedback meanwhile because it helps the site a lot. I want to add both many more routes and have a well functioning verification system. I hope that the map is giving all of you an enjoyable experience.
A lot of the "feedback" below seems to consist of people complaining that this is not a comprehensive map, despite your site clearly saying it's a " curated atlas of notable passenger routes — not every railway on Earth". Sigh.
Hacker News have a limited amount of comments which I can leave. so will give the link to my twitter: https://x.com/Flightmussy which I want to use as the communication channel besides the email.
I have gotten perhaps a bit too much harsh feedback with this project, since I have posted it on the RailUK Forum and OSM community to give feedback about this project. Until yesterday, the website was called Trainrouter, but I decided to change the url because it was a bad fit for what the website really tried to do.
You should have seen how bad this project was before I posted it on RailUK.
I am going to be honest. When I started to create websites, I did that because I wanted to earn money. The job marked has made me a bit too desperate, since AI kinda took away my entry level job which I been studying for 5 years to be able to get.
I am going to answer that this is a leisurely hobby. This project has been very difficult for me to work on. If I did not like this project, I would fully scrap it and just move on to something easier and with a wider audience.
I have been spending so many hours just to fix the route tracing and has made me so frustrated. I guess this is like playing Transport Fever 2 for me, because I have spent many hundreds of hours playing this game before. It is fun for me to see the results on the interactive map, and to see that it actually gets to become a proper rail map.
If I could monetize this somehow I would be happy to do so. I am not going to say no thank you to free money. What I will not do with this project is to put annoying ads or make it subscription based. I want it to be free to use, no annoying sign in and no ads. I hope to make money in an ethical way in the future, that would be so fantastic.
I have an another leisure project "CastleMap" which is becoming quite famous, and I could already have monetized it through ads and do nothing really. However, I just love this project too much to even think about that. I still work my ass off to make it even better. Hence, both Castlemap and World Train Map are non commercial projects.
The map is ok, but mostly I'm interested in the number of map apps people are cranking out with AI. The design elements pretty clearly mark them as such (and it's even more obvious once you poke around a bit). I love maps, so I get it, they tend to hook people, and the relative density of information can be very high.
I work in the electricity space (and of course we have a map[0]), and it has been wild to see the number of "I was a PM at a B2B SaaS/AI company and now I'm here to solve the grid with this vibe-coded tool", which inevitably involves a map. Seems like an inflection point was hit sometime late last year where first SMEs could make little apps they couldn't before, and then it expanded further into people who truly don't know a space but the AI can make it look like they do to other people who also don't, and the cycle continues.
Openrailway is a bit more technical product than World Train Map. The goal of World Train Map is to have a good selection of almost all passenger rail routes around the world, where the user can hover over each route to get a quick story.
The tracing on World Train Map is based on OSM and I am thankful for both their tracings and the community which has corrected this project. Most casual users like me are not interested in signals or the technical stuff about the line, but rather simpler technical details such as speed, average speed and where you can take the route from and to.
Besides OSM is really all rail routes, while World Train Map is only passenger service.
Besides the obvious fact you stated, I think they actually show different information: the thing we're discussing is a map of popular or famous or remarkable train routes, not the map of all the railways in the world.
Then you must be sad that the "AI slop" is a user friendly, working toy whereas the OSM data one is just a miserable static database-render.
Go and compare them. I love getting lost in data, and I was happy to see all the overloaded, very badly curated, non-dynamic OpenRailwayMap. I cannot click on a railway to get more info, the electrification map is just a mess of many similarly shaded colors. Not user friendly, even if it _has_ the data, it is unfriendly to the user, and makes exploration hard.
I say this as an OSM enthusiast and contributor.
Compare this to the "AI slop"; even though at first I ran into a misinformation (Zambia central links to London Central), it still made me stay on the page and explore some scenic routes. I obviously knew that this is NOT all the railways, but something fun to engage with and maybe even learn / explore some new things, hell maybe start planning my winter vacation.
I guess what I am saying is: your comment has no added value, just sourness, negativity.
I hope the author keeps iterating on this project, eventually make it more OSM-interconnected, fix the tiny bugs and focus on bringing joy to us who are interested. After all, this product is out in public now, whereas your miserable comment will get buried here for good.
This is a very dangerous site for train travel geeks. Like, what am I doing with my life? I should be catching the Nile Valley Sleeper, 879km "Overnight up the Nile past Luxor’s temples: wake to feluccas and the First Cataract at Aswan."
I have the same feeling. There are so many places and things to experience which I want to do. I am not sure what I am doing with my life either.
In a way I have to grow up and become "successful", but at the same time I would rather just sit in a train somewhere in the alps with the craziest view, have a small wine bottle at train table and trying the best ice cream ever in a random North Italian town.
I really admire the train vloggers on Youtube because that seems so cool to do.
I do not know where to even start, there are so many routes that I want to do right now.
This is missing just about all of the short lines in America. So by default the is NOT a world train map. This link and website is misleading to think it is the world of train maps. Disappointing.
Amazing. Also super interesting to see that when you filter for high speed rail it’s basically Japan, China and Europe. America (north and south), Africa - basically the rest of the world is in dark ages
The high speed filter is a bit misleading. Amsterdam to Berlin is marked as high speed. But it takes 6 hours and 41 minutes to cover the ~580km distance. It might technically qualify as high speed but it doesn’t feel like it.
Washington DC to NYC is comparable.
At night I can legally drive to Amsterdam faster by car. 670km on the Autobahn in 6 hours can be done. Not as comfortable of course, but just to prove the point.
I took the Amsterdam to Berlin route a few days ago with almost two hour delays because of some diversions. There are very few proper high speed tracks in Germany. Mostly the trains are routed over older tracks that aren't suitable for higher speeds.
Basically the only stretch where the train to Amsterdam might hit anywhere close to its maximum speed is the 20% of the journey between Berlin and Wolfsburg. And even there it slows down frequently. But you might see it go 250 km/hour for a few minutes.
I took a proper highspeed train from Madrid to Valencia a few years ago. It goes 300km/hour. It leaves Madrid, accelerates. And then a bit over 1.5 hours later you arrive in Valencia. It's about 400km. The train has one stop about mid way. Otherwise, it stays at its maximum speed the whole journey. At that speed, Amsterdam-Berlin should be doable in a bit over 2 hours.
That line should skip cities with less than 100k population. Would probably shave an hour. Bad Bentheim has a population of 16,000 why is the ICE stopping there? There isn’t a border anymore with passport checks. It’s only 30km from the Hengelo stop. Just skip it.
World Train Map is, by design, a curated map of interesting passenger trains, not a comprehensive map.
The problem with every comprehensive map I've seen is that they are way too comprehensive. If you look at Congo on https://www.openrailwaymap.org/, you might assume the country has a functional passenger railway network, when almost most lines shown were for bulk cargo only, fell into disrepair in the 1960s and certainly haven't had passenger services in decades if ever. Even for first world places like Australia there are tons of supposedly "main lines" listed that are nothing of the sort.
It's not comprehensive. More than 75% of the passenger lines are missing in Belgium. I imagine this is the same for many other countries, especially the ones with a lot of passenger service.
I am aware of that. Lines like Karlovy Vary - Loket or Strakonice - Tabor are missing. I have travel by rail in Czech Republic a bit too much according to my friends lol.
The reason why they are not added yet is because I am working on a verification system. I see that there are many routes in Czech Republic which are not shown either in OBB Scotty. I will see if I can use Ceske Drahy to verify and get at least almost all routes.
Interesting! It's definitely not complete, quite a few reasonably common passenger routes in Europe I know are missing. But a fun idea, one I would love to play around with more were it more complete
The last few days I have been working on a new verification system. I hope to be able to add many more routes through this system, so that World Train Map can have high quality routes that are verified.
I am trying to use a verification system to get the data from, however it is an incomplete system. The idea of the system is the route being traced either by OSM or local operators data and either use OBB Scotty (for European routes) or local operators data to make sure that the route actually exists.
For example this is how I got the data for the route Sarajevo - Ploce.
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from 2 OpenStreetMap relations, their own nodes end to end: relation 2674114 (169 km), relation 1646595 (30 km) — 192 km of the route between them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: the whole line lies on real track, a median 9 m from it
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: ŽFBiH red vožnje — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
There is also something about train routes, but these messages are conflicting... also you don't immediately see explanation that it is curated d that's why people complain about missing routes.
Really hard to understand purpose when visiting first time.
Please give feedback meanwhile because it helps the site a lot. I want to add both many more routes and have a well functioning verification system. I hope that the map is giving all of you an enjoyable experience.
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