Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network

I had to press the Back button a LOT of times to get back to HN!

Switzerland's real-time map of trains and public transport (zoom in on a city to view its public transport in real time). You can find boats too.

And if you check on/off the other options, you get way more informations.

https://maps.trafimage.ch/ch.sbb.netzkarte?lang=en&baselayer...

Bit puzzled by some of the station data. This train:

https://www.map.signalbox.io/?train=202607066710114&location...

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?

Checkout the French equivalent : https://carto.tchoo.net. Looks more complete.

Past similar HN submission got no attention, whereas the UK's top page. Interesting !

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45249351

Shameless self-promotion: I make a departure board for the Swiss public transportation network: https://www.stationdisplay.com/

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.

> 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.

Hmm, that's...interesting?

Would be better if it had some technical explanation rather than just yet another public transport map. This:

https://vgcgroup.co.uk/news/signalbox-for-train-locations/

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.

There's one for the Czech network (one of the densest in the world, if not the densest) https://grapp.spravazeleznic.cz

Tokyo equivalent with animated trains, weather, flights and more: https://minitokyo3d.com/

Here is the map made by the Swedish transport authority: https://www.trafikverket.se/trafikinformation/tagkarta/

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.

Boston: https://tmap.live.

London: https://londonunderground.live

this reminds me of the London specific equivalent posted awhile back: https://londonunderground.live (previously discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43651390).

Hungary https://vonatinfo.mav.hu/

I would love to see this for Germany :D

Tokyo: https://minitokyo3d.com

Here's the Danish one (with some trains in Sweden): http://landetspuls.dk

Off-topic, I don't get why people still use a www subdomain, especially so in this case, www.map. Conway's Law in action?

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.

Used this many times during the longer commutes across country, works well.

Is this actually based on GPS (or similar) on the trains, or is it just interpolating signal times (which are waaaay coarser)?

Topping out at 10 minutes delay for the most severe marker colour is an interesting choice.

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.

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.

https://kam.mff.cuni.cz/~babilon/zpmapa2

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.

Would be useful if they add real time cop location information so you can avoid getting arrested for the crime of being white while being assulted.