Alternatives
Products that do what The Official National Train Map Sucked, So I Made My Own does
Hi HN, I’m a junior developer. I wanted to share a side project I’ve been working on. The national railway carrier (BDZ) has no public API. They have an official map but the UI is quite dated, often lags, and doesn't show the full route context. I wrote a short write-up about the process here: https://www.pavlinbg.com/posts/bg-train-tracker I know it's still rough around the edges (I'm still working on it), but I’d love to hear your feedback or suggestions!
- 1IH
I built this because I was interested in the data. Didn't fully get it to what I wanted, but thought I'd share it nonetheless. Maybe someone has better data sources they could share! Turns out live ship tracking APIs are expensive so I manually just copied the json from https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home/centerx:57.4/cente... I'll probably have an ai agent do the same thing on some cron interval, if this gets any fanfare. To actually know if the port is open without live ship tracking I found…
Apr 2026 · ishormuzopenyet.com
- 2IB
This was something I built while trying to look for housing in Toronto that was decently transit-accessible to my office while still cheap. The backend is written in Rust. It parses public GTFS data from transit agencies and performs a simple heuristics-based BFS on the bus lines to calculate how long to reach all points in a city. The frontend uses React and Mapbox GL to render each individual road segment based on how long it takes to reach. This project was a great excuse to learn Rust, deployments, and mapping. The source code is here if you are interested:…
2023 · map.henryn.xyz
- 3SH
Over the past week I built a project to let people self-host an entire maps stack so they don't have to send data to the big G. Right now it includes a base map, geocoder and directions server. Currently only bicycle directions are supported, and I'm only hosting tiles for Seattle because I'm unemployed and can't afford to host data for the whole planet. Check it out! https://maps.ellenhp.me/ https://github.com/ellenhp/headway Ultimately I'd like to really focus on transit routing (not implemented) but I'll probably throw a driving mode in there too.
2022 · maps.ellenhp.me
- 4BR
Hey guys, I built a route planner that is mostly focused on bike touring and using existing bike infrastructure. For each request you're shown what bike tracks/trails your route uses and can further explore them by showing them on map or going to the official trail route. The main idea for the app is to have a friendly and easy to use planner that would make heavy use of official bike trails data (mainly from OpenStreetMap) and make it easy to plan a longer trip using the best possible bike routes out there. Currently the app only works for the Euro region but I'm planning to add North…
2024 · trailimap.com
- 5
Tokyo Trains▲13Semi inspired by the 3d Shinjuku station that was posted again recently, I noticed it was missing a large portion of the "complex" where "complex" is defined loosly has how far you can walk without stepping outside. So I asked Claude to make a 3d map of all Tokyo Trains, no libraries, and let you zoom into stations, and the first version with both map and the Shinjuku complex was ready in about 3 hours. It spent another 7 or so in various nit picky things I asked for to get to the current version. I know these will only get better but I think the thing I find most interesting is no libraries…
26d ago · greggman.github.io
- 6
- 7BG
I have created a single map that lets you easily browse all bus, tram, metro, ferry and train routes. I’ve loaded some data from Europe, Israel and India. It's called BuzMap: Here is an update, there is a previous outline linked at the bottom State of the BuzMap - http://buz-map.com I have done significant work over the last 3 months to get BuzMap further towards a usable product and at least prove the scalability of the architecture and I hope a glimpse of where we can go with this.. I have what I think is a viable user interaction model. Upon touching or hovering over a section…
2020
- 8DA
Hi all, This project release is a long time coming. It was a big uphill battle, and by far my largest endeavor so far. I built it for Sandstorm because I believe in Sandstorm's model, and I wanted to show that there's still life and potential in it. If you're inspired, joining our OpenCollective would be really helpful: https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity (keeping in mind that Sandstorm has now moved from its original leadership to a community project https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org). You can also join our mailing list or…
2023 · sandstorm.org
- 9LW
Hi HN, I made a web game to practice country locations a while ago and HN liked it, so I thought I'd post my updated version as well. As for how the game works and feels, I'd really recommend you checking it out for yourself, it's free, no signup, no ads. The tech stack is Vue + ts + Tailwind/Daisy for the looks. The learning algorithm is a slight modification of the ts version of FSRS. If you have anything to add, it's open source as well (https://github.com/koljapluemer/learn-worldmap), although not well documented yet. In the end it's just a little sideproject,…
2025 · map.koljapluemer.com
- 10FL
deck.gl based visualiser of the TFL Api + National Rails to be able to track (with minimal drift) a train along the way in London and to the nearest airports. If you pick one from any platform in https://nexttrain.london basically you can share your train journey along the rails. Build to test Cloudflare workers and their infra along with deck.gl performance that is incredible in my opinion.
Jul 2026 · ride.nexttrain.london
- 11PI
I made a public transport route planning program that's capable of planning journeys across Europe or North America! There's only one other FOSS project I know of (MOTIS/Transitous) that can do transit routing at this scale, and in the testing I've performed mine is about 50x faster. I've spent a few weeks on this project now and it's getting to the point where I can show it off, but the API responses need a lot of work before they're usable for any downstream application. Example query (Berlin to Barcelona):…
2024 · github.com
- 12MO
Hey Everybody! Hope you had a merry christmas Today I had a bit of fun with Claude. Started by scraping YC's startups list, then ran them through OpenAI's embedding service, then UMAP'd the embedding to reduce the dimension to just two coordinates and then just forced Claude to write React that would compile to visualize that. I had fun and I think it's interesting, so take a look! Also note that you won't be able to zoom on mobile (found about this Plotly limitation way too late). If there's interest I can fix this issue by changing plotting libs tomorrow :) Merry christmas
2024 · yc-map.vercel.app
- 13PF
Hey HN! A long time ago I built a map of trains at trains.fyi, and then realized nobody had bought planes.fyi - so this is my new map project. It's a bunch of things, but mostly, a 3D map of aircraft around given airports, as well as the weather, ATIS, and other data sources visualized in 3D and unique ways. Like most of the stuff I build, it's got no real use, but I think it's neat. If you like planes, check out the CYYZ/KJFK map, weather, and runway tabs - I put the most work into that. Also any feature requests, questions, comments, etc are always appreciated!
Dec 2025 · planes.fyi
- 14IM
Hi HN, I built a little tool to help me get better at remembering country locations on the map: https://learn-worldmap.netlify.app/ It's made from plain HTML/CSS/JS, and not intended to make any money or anything. Just thought that maybe someone else may enjoy it. Also of course happy about any feedback! Cheerz.
2023 · learn-worldmap.netlify.app
- 15MB
2023 · memgraph.com
- 16
Hello Hacker News, this is Ashish. We started building Stackdome in 2024 as a hobby project. The idea was to package the tooling in the CNCF/cloud-native ecosystem into an opinionated platform, so that developers can get a well engineered platform without learning Kubernetes YAMLology or a dozen other projects from the CNCF landscape. Railway and Render did this well for their hosted products. I wanted to bring that level of polish and DX to something you can self-host. Stackdome uses Kubernetes underneath, but it's completely transparent to users. (I have some ideas for an expert mode…
24d ago · stackdome.com
- 17ST
In Summer last year, I drove a car from London to Mongolia (and back). This is a map of my route: http://smstravelmap.com/map/0f0mvsnc I built a service to provide travel mapping for everyone, even where mobile data is impractical. http://smstravelmap.com/ Would love to hear what people think!
2015
- 18BG
2019 · buz-map.com
- 19WB
Hi. We just open sourced Bullet Train, a Feature Flag and Remote Config platform. It's a collection of tools: server API, admin front end and clients for a bunch of different platforms. Together they allow you to control feature flags and remote config across projects, environments and users. We realised that we were building ad-hoc feature flag stuff into individual projects over and over, so we had a look around to see if there was a way of doing this in a more formal manner. There are a few commercial solutions around but they were quite expensive and seemed to be aimed more at the…
2018
- 20OS
Hey everyone, I wanted to share what I have been working on recently. I had this itch for a long time to figure out if terrain contour matching could help with ground navigation, by only only relying on iphone's sensors and public data. So far I have had decent results. This is a working prototype, but there is a lot that is in the pipeline. If you notice anything weird, let me know or open a PR. Any feedback, comments are welcome :)
Jun 2026 · github.com
- 21UC
Hi HN, https://companies.bx.tc My colleague and I put together this tool for easily searching UK company data. We run a few server side batches daily to extract data from various government sources before linking it all together in (what is now) a fairly large database. We're also using this project as a way to test out a new JS UI library we built (similar to Vue, but a bit faster) to see how it stands up in a real project. We'd love to hear your feedback and any ideas you have for how we can improve the dashboard! Thanks :)
2020
- 22OF
Hey HN! I'd like to share my personal experiment with a different way of finding train journeys across the UK. When I book flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner for flexible searches - multiple airports, custom connections, creative routes, etc. But rail search feels oddly constrained. All the UK train operators offer basically the same experience, and surface the exact same routes. I always suspected there were better or just different options that weren’t being shown. Where is the "Skyscanner for trains"? After digging through the national rail data feeds, I decided to have a go at…
Mar 2026 · railraptor.com
- 23PN
Hello HN, Long-time lurker, first-time poster here. I've created a service that creates a "flow map" of your mobile app. Check it out at: https://prodscape.net. The goal is to reduce last-minute regressions, promote holistic discussion, and help develop more ownership within an organization. This is something that I would have liked to have had when I was working at a big company. Some caveats: 1.) Only iOS is currently supported but Android-support will be coming soon. 2.) You need a developer-signed IPA file (see the guide on creating an IPA file here:…
2022
- 24VP
I've been tracking public transport data in NZ for a couple of years now, and have now built a site for its display. Public transport is quite a contentious issue here; what's better than to inform decisions with data? I’m posting this to ask some switched on people what the best step going forward for would be for this project. If someone was building a similar site for your city, what would you want to see? https://github.com/allister-grange/missinglink
2023 · missinglink.link
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