Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to The Official National Train Map Sucked, So I Made My Own
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!
This is an interactive train map for Bulgaria's national railway system, built to address limitations in the official carrier's outdated interface and lack of public API access. It displays full route context and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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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 · its alternatives →
- 2SH
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 · its alternatives →
- 3BR
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 · its alternatives →
- 4
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…
Aug 2026 · greggman.github.io · its alternatives →
- 5
Tasmap▲111Hi there, I just saw a cool city map project (https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter) gaining some attention on Hacker News. I'm building a similar product so I want to share it with you. If you're interested in beautiful maps, maybe give Tasmap a try. It's not just a static, beautiful map; it's dynamic and interactive, and connected with articles. There are 20+ well designed themes, and if you're not good at design, you can even have AI design it for you. You can embed it in your site or install it as an app on your phone. You can create a beautiful and useful map.…
2020 · tasmap.app · its alternatives →
- 6BG
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 · its alternatives →
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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 · its alternatives →
- 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 · its alternatives →
- 10
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 · its alternatives →
- 11
MapScroll▲109Hi HN, I built this after getting frustrated trying to map out things like “Ancient mayan ruins” or “James Bond movie locations” on Google "My" Maps. You basically have to drop pins manually, hunt down photos, copy links, it’s slow and never feels like an actual story. With MapScroll, you just type something like “Marco Polo’s route” or “forgotten WWII sites in France”, and it geocodes, grabs images + articles, and plots everything into a shareable story map. Each marker comes with a little gallery and sources tied to your prompt. You can also refine the first draft which AI creates before…
2025 · mapscroll.ai · its alternatives →
- 12
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 · its alternatives →
- 13MO
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 · its alternatives →
- 14PF
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 · its alternatives →
- 15IM
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 · its alternatives →
- 16
Explore the Berlin subway system using Memgraph Lab, mapping subway stops as nodes and connections as edges in a graph database.
2023 · memgraph.com · its alternatives →
- 17
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…
Aug 2026 · stackdome.com · its alternatives →
- 18BG
2019 · buz-map.com · its alternatives →
- 19
We built Maptoolkit.org - a free, production-grade vector maps service built on OpenStreetMap and MapLibre. Map rendering and tile hosting have historically been either expensive (Google, Mapbox) or complex to maintain yourself. (Plus: Their maps are car-focused.) Our maps feature max data zoom 15, global hill-shading, 3D terrain, contour lines, water depths, and specialized styles (like Hiking, Cycling, Winter). No sign up or API keys required. You can use it like this: ``` const map = new maplibregl.Map({ container: 'map', style: 'https://styles.maptoolkit.org/summer.json',…
Jul 2026 · maptoolkit.org · its alternatives →
- 20
Save $5 by buying both books together!Book 1 - The Definitive Guide to GTFSLearn all about the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and how to consume open public transportation data, including:All about the structure of a GTFS feedHow to import a GTFS feed to an SQL database and perform querie
2014 · gtfsbook.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hey HN, the is Chris, creator of FireDBG. We’ve been working on this debugger just about a year now. Time travel debugging isn’t a new concept, the new idea here is to use call tree visualisation to help us navigate the debug trace. It supports various Linux distros on x64 and macOS on x64 and M1. It’s only available for Rust right now, but we do want to bring this debugging experience to other programming languages. Please give it a try! Would love to know your thoughts. What’s your anecdote in debugging programs? My stupidity is usually in the form of: after a few hours of debugging, I…
2023 · firedbg.sea-ql.org · its alternatives →
- 22
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 · its alternatives →
- 23UC
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 · its alternatives →
- 24AU
2021 · magpie-maps.com · its alternatives →
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