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Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

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Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#281

Post by willyt »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #260
djvdq wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the UK and Europe UK is part of Europe. It's like writing "In California and the USA", or "In Mexico and North America".

No, it's like writing "Mexico and America". If you're going to add geographic qualifiers like "North", the equivalent would be more like "UK and West Europe". Without such qualifiers, the meaning is clearly "continental Europe", which is a meaningful distinction when it comes to the rail, because they have two almost entirely disjoint rail systems. Ok, yes, technically the European rail system does actually physicall…

Uk does actually follow EU regulations and standards because all the technology is designed and manufactured in the EU. HS2 is being built to an EU standard loading gauge with EU standard electronic signalling, likewise crossrail. When routes are upgraded to electronic signalling they are upgraded to an EU standard signalling technology, likewise with electrification. Loading gauge is typically smaller but when new bridges are built they will try to aim for the largest EU standard loading gauge that’s practical. The reason why you can’t easily run a night train from Edinburgh to Paris is not technological it’s because the customs and border requirements necessitate an expensive building like an airport to house them. It’s not true that the EU rail system is homogeneous either, e.g Belgium, Germany and France all have electrified lines running at different voltages which can require bi or tri mode trains for through running.

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#282

Post by mritzmann »

gadcam wrote: post #273

Here is THE MAP for France ! https://carto.graou.info/46.90174/1.83822/5.4455/0/0 Shameless plug : we are developping Trainscanner to travel accross Europe https://www.train-scanner.com/?u=hn-c-38434574 Do not hesitate to leave us some feedback :)

Interesting. Are there open APIs that you use for train-scanner or do you have to reverse engineer some apps?

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#283

Post by hnaccount_rng »

noirbot wrote: post #87
ascar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume it would be less about the dominance of passanger displacing freight and more about scale/distance. Germany is smaller than Texas (half the area). How often is it economical to put stuff on trains before loading them on trucks again for distances sub 1000km?

Oh sure, but the "haha the US isn't even a third world country with its train system" people already are ignoring scale/density when they're laughing at the US rail systems. I'm past even bothering dealing with that bad faith take. My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight i…

But the density in the US is not _that_ different. Sure if you take the average over the whole country or states like Texas or Arizona then you end up with numbers. But the north east of the US is comparably densely populated to Western Europe. And even parts of California/the west coast are similarly densely populated. Albeit with larger separations between population centers. Which, as a German, does not sound so bad, given that our high-speed rail has to stop every 30mins because the next city just isn’t that far away.

Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.

On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)

So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#284

Post by sofixa »

adhesive_wombat wrote: post #260
djvdq wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the UK and Europe UK is part of Europe. It's like writing "In California and the USA", or "In Mexico and North America".

No, it's like writing "Mexico and America". If you're going to add geographic qualifiers like "North", the equivalent would be more like "UK and West Europe". Without such qualifiers, the meaning is clearly "continental Europe", which is a meaningful distinction when it comes to the rail, because they have two almost entirely disjoint rail systems. Ok, yes, technically the European rail system does actually physicall…

> Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically

That's not true. There are some local connections and integrations, but outside of high speed rail which is generally built using the same standard, each country has their own load gauge, electrification standard, signalling system, etc. Cross-border trains are usually special traninsets built to multiple standards to be compatible.

There is progress on more integration and standartisation, and pretty much all new lines are built to the same standards, but the vast majority of rail is existing.

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#285

Post by sofixa »

jcranmer wrote: post #105
kylecazar wrote: post #27

Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time. I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.

US population can be approximated as relatively dense populations in California, the Northeast, a central portion of Texas, and parts of the Midwest, with rural Europe-ish levels of density (with some greater pockets of density nestled within) in the rest of the country ~east of the Mississippi (and a lesser degree in the Pacific Northwest), and truly empty regions basically everywhere else. In terms of where there s…

What about Florida and the general Southeast? Memphis - Nashville - Birmingham Atlanta - Charlotte, going north to Virginia, and south to Florida definitely look like decently dense and urbanised to merit high speed rail between some of them.

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#286

Post by sofixa »

rgmerk wrote: post #218
ska wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The passenger rail coverage [edit: service] in most of North America is basically pathetic, for systemic reasons.

Intercity passenger rail makes little sense over most of the USA, outside the existing northeast corridor. In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.

There are plenty of locations in the US where fast intercity regional rail could easily be useful and work. Florida, Portland - Vancouver, Alabama/Georgia/Carolinas/Virginias, Midwest.

Yeah, few people will take a cross-country train outside of for the novelty and the attraction itself (which are still not to be dismissed), but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of <4-5h trips that can be made via train if there was good, reliable and fast service.

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#287

Post by sofixa »

gadcam wrote: post #273

Here is THE MAP for France ! https://carto.graou.info/46.90174/1.83822/5.4455/0/0 Shameless plug : we are developping Trainscanner to travel accross Europe https://www.train-scanner.com/?u=hn-c-38434574 Do not hesitate to leave us some feedback :)

Nice map for France! But it seems to include only SNCF and subsidiaries, so no RATP suburban services (RER A and RER most of B) nor partnerships operated by other companies (RENFE SNCF or DB operated by RENFE or DB).

As for Trainscanner, it looks promising, but it's a bit weird having buses show up on Trainscanner, and as the first and only option on most of the first trips in the default search (trips from Paris, today). A UX like Trainline's where it shows trains and buses in different tabs would be nicer, IMO.

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#289

Post by idiotsecant »

waveBidder wrote: post #264
fletchowns wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's ok to see real time location of planes and cargo ships, how come it wouldn't be ok for trains?

way more attack surface?

If you want to blow up a train it's already pretty easy. Find a track and wait.

Re: Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

#290

Post by plowjockey »

eskibars wrote: post #246
dhosek wrote: post #229

I’d kind of like real-time tracking of freight trains. There’s a BNSF grade crossing between my home and my parents’ and it would be nice to know whether I should take the 1 mile detour to get to the tunnel beneath the rail yard if there’s a train going to be blocking (I suppose it would also help to have info on the length of the trains so I’d know if the train in front of me is almost clear or if there’s another mi…

It'd be great. My understanding is that there's basically no live data for freight trains unfortunately

Since the implementation of Positive Train Control (PTC) there is live data but the RRs don't make it publicly available. Real time GPS data is transmitted to the Computer Aided Dispatching (CAD) system and combined with consist data they can determine where any one car is located at any time.

By the time I left the company several years ago that data was being restricted to only certain employees. As noted below, hasmat is likely the reason this kind of data is not publicly accessible. It is shared in a limited fashion with shippers, etc.

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