Mapping 219,469 Rail Journeys

Useful takeaways from this story.

One Day on Rails maps more than 70,000 train journeys across Europe during one single day this summer.

Rather than showing trains at a single point in time, One Day on Rails uses real timetable data to animate thousands of services moving along their actual routes.

In total, it maps 70,427 scheduled journeys, with cross-border services carefully deduplicated so that the same train isn't counted twice when it appears in different national datasets.

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The useful part

One Day on Rails maps more than 70,000 train journeys across Europe during one single day this summer. It also maps 5,737 journeys across the USA, 34,206 journeys in Tokyo and 11,075 journeys in London. One Day On Rails visualizes an entire day's railway activity on one single animated interactive map.

How it works

Rather than showing trains at a single point in time, One Day on Rails uses real timetable data to animate thousands of services moving along their actual routes.
In total, it maps 70,427 scheduled journeys, with cross-border services carefully deduplicated so that the same train isn't counted twice when it appears in different national datasets.
One Day on Rails turns what would normally be an enormous and rather dry collection of timetable data into something surprisingly hypnotic: a whole day's worth of railway journeys brought to life on a map.
Inspired by One Day on Rails, Clock-face Schedule maps a single day across the Swiss rail network.
There are also separate visualizations for Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, France and Berlin, as well as the USA, Tokyo, New York and London.

What to take from it

The individual visualizations together account for 219,469 mapped train journeys.

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