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Is the interesting part the upvotes, meaning there's more people interested in UK train networks than French ones ? And it's a comment on demographics ?
Or is the interesting part that the UK one is real-time, and the French one isn't (or at least, zooming in, I don't see them moving).
Real-time feed's probably just cheaper to get in UK. Network Rail's open data API is free and decent, whereas SNCF's real-time stuff is locked down or costs money. We hit that wall building a similar side project years ago.
Note that carto.tchoo does not provide real position in real-time: it only has access to departures, stops, delays and suppressions and interpolate position based on this.
This means that if your train is running at half-speed or stopped but does not result in an official delay, the position will not match reality.
is a train from Cambridge to Kings Cross - and in the side panel it shows it as calling at the new Cambridge South station. But Cambridge South isn't shown on the map. That's kinda understandable (because it opened a week ago), but Cambridge North (which opened in 2017) also isn't shown on the map. Neither are offered in any of the auto-complete dropdowns?
I'm wondering if the station data a static dataset which hasn't been updated in a long time?
> Signalbox's technology identifies the train a device is on by matching a snapshot of smartphone data to a train’s trajectory data. The technology uses advanced algorithms works even with severely degraded data. We are able to pinpoint a smartphone to any type of train without background location tracking or hardware.
Yeah we hit this exact problem building a similar transit tracker. Accelerometer + gyro fingerprinting works but degrades hard in tunnels/dense urban rail. Ended up blending in barometric pressure changes for elevation cues, helped disambiguate parallel tracks way more than GPS ever did.
"Acquired by Trainline in 2023, Signalbox works with organisations across the rail ecosystem to improve customer information and operational awareness."
Dutch (and Dutch-bound) rail network overview: https://treinposities.nl/
And the equivalent for buses: https://busposities.nl/
Not all of them have GPS trackers, so some positions are guessed.
There's functionality for this in the official Dutch Railways app, but it looks like they didn't bother putting that onto their website. There is a common source of open data for most of these details, but I don't find the docs to be very complete.
suggests the data mostly comes from railway signalling information, plus a bit of "AI" in some way. I wonder how far apart railway signals usually are, or what the AI is trained on, or anything really vs just looking at a map.
This only seems to be standard overground trains. If you add in metro networks like the London tube, or light rail / trams like in Manchester, then you’d get at least hundreds more.
The map includes metros across the Tyne and Wear Metro in NE England, and while its not perfect, it's by far the most useful train live tracking I've ever seen. There's quite a few places in the UK with different rail systems that don't fit together (and have apps of varying quality/usefulness)
Pan-Europe scope's great till DB feed goes stale at 3am and nobody notices for six countries at once. Single-country tools fail smaller, page fewer people.
very cool. Unrelated but anytime im looking at a map be it city roads, rails subway, etc i wish there was a way to filter the layers based on construction date.
I would like to be able to see when each road/section was built. I assume with GoogleEarth and other databases it should be possible to run some kind changelog comparison and do this at scale for at least the last 20 years or so.
A couple of obvious observations:
* Does not include Northern Ireland or the Isle of Man, both of which have notable rail networks (as they are not in GB).
* Does not include heritage railways. There are a number of other railways on here which are not marked but offer tourist travel.
I live next to a railway line so I'm in the (not particularly unique, and definitely not enviable) position to compare what's on the map to "IRL" trains, and I can tell you it's as good as useless.
- Trains appearing on the map that aren't anywhere to be seen on the tracks.
- Trains on the tracks that don't appear on the map.
- Trains moving away from the station that according to the timetable view shouldn't have left the station yet.
- Trains on the map seemingly stopping and changing direction, only to reverse course once again.
The map shows a single line segment for what is in fact a multi-line stretch of railway. That's okay as a simplification (I guess), but the icons aren't pinned to the line, so appear to be driving off the track, or even on the adjacent street.
As for realtime - even if the data was accurate and timely, a 2Hz refresh rate most definitely isn't realtime.
Sorry if it seems like I'm shitting on it - it's a fun toy, but I wouldn't depend on it for anything important.
>it's a fun toy, but I wouldn't depend on it for anything important.
This could be said for the rail network as a whole.
Neglect and underinvestment over the last 60+ years has left it in a sorry state, and debacles such as HS2 show how government has no ability to deliver proper material upgrades to the aging infrastructure and service. The direction of travel (scuse the pun) has been clear since the Beeching cuts: roads are the priority. Add to that Neoliberal divestment policies and we end up where we are today: overcrowded, filthy, ugly trains barely fit for cattle transport and chronically understaffed stations and train crews. Not to mention the extortionate prices for a ticket to travel on the network.
I adore rail travel, but dread the necessity of using it any time I go on a journey.
I remember my colleague from MFF UK, Robert Babilon, producing his first real-time map of Czech trains in 2004.
The page, called Babitron, still exists and still keeps that delightful 2004 look. I visited it a few days ago. Unfortunately today there is a message "We are moving Babitron to a different server", so the link isn't working.
Perhaps I’m going mad based off the praise heaped in other responses, but - something seems wildly off with the locations?
I just witnessed a London Liverpool street service plough through the M25 motorway - about 40 miles south of it's typical route and 5 miles south of the nearest actual railway.
Dozens of the trains seem to be traversing through the English channel/La Manche towards the north sea.
In fact the number of trains actually tracking a rail line (and this is outside of the cities where the tube/metro might obscure this) seems in the minority. Most seem to be going straight through the middle of farmers fields on some obscure course unrelated to theirs.
Seen this derail before, every UK infra thread since National Rail's journey planner in the 90s eventually pulls in some US culture war baggage. Wrong country, wrong dataset, wrong decade.
The device-fingerprinting-to-trajectory-matching approach sounds similar to work on map matching for transit inference, though usually applied to GPS traces rather than accelerometer/gyroscope signatures. Curious how they handle multi-track sections where trajectories nearly overlap for miles.
And if you check on/off the other options, you get way more informations.
https://maps.trafimage.ch/ch.sbb.netzkarte?lang=en&baselayer...