I'm working on a fully offline, client-side train journey planner for UK rail - https://railraptor.com
When booking flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner that let you do flexible searches - multiple destinations, 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 building my own route planner that runs completely offline in the browser. This gave me the freedom to implement more complex filters, search to/from multiple stations, and do it without a persistent network connection.
Now I'm finding routes that aren't offered by the standard train operators, connecting at different stations, and finding it's often easier to travel to different stations (some I'd never heard of) that get me closer and faster to where I actually want to go!
It's still a little rough and I'd like to add more features such as fares, VSTP data, and direct-links to book tickets, but wanted to share early and get some initial feedback before investing more time into it. So, thanks in advance - let me know what you think.
I like your idea. If you dig around Rory Sutherlands YouTube appearances he talks about how train routers fall down by always looking for the fastest route, where he would prefer the nicest, often cheaper and slightly slower. He has a fair amount to say on the subject so it is a bit of a goldmine.
I sent you some feedback on a routing failure because I didn't want to post exactly where I live here.
I think you need pricing. Works offline is cool, but why not pull in the pricing if people are online? Train fares are so variable depending on time of day, especially if they go via London. I could have a trip that could be £300 cheaper by taking a 30 minute longer trip that avoids London. I need pricing to get my best journey.
This sounds very nice! A slightly adjacent question: have you discovered any providers that can recommend train journeys based on price? Sort of like the explore feature you find on sites like Google Flights, Ryanair and Flixbus. Sometimes when the wanderlust hits I've tried searching around for cheap train tickets, but it isn't simple using sites likes DB/OEBB/SBB/SNCF/etc
I'm looking at how to add price data to railraptor, but it might mean sacrificing the fully-offline capability... once I have prices it should absolutely be possible to build a filter along the lines of "find me the cheapest popular destinations that are at least 50 miles away".
As someone not in the UK but would like to play with it / try it out but don't know much about the UK it would be nice if there was either a drop of locations so I could randomly pick a place or select on a map and get the closest stop.
A map feature might help people do "spur of the moment" planning if they are looking for more of an adventure than any specific location.
Great that it stores the entire timetable in only 6MB(?) of storage.
Some feedback: I don't think it can route through London as it isn't aware of tube connections between stations? And the classic stress test of Penzance to Thurso is too long for the routing algorithm, but I imagine that's beyond scope?
Thanks for the feedback. I was missing the "Fixed Links" data, which covers any transfers that aren't part of the normal rail network (e.g. walking/bus/tube). I've just added that, so the tube routes via London should work for you now.
The routeing data is pretty complex - there are layers on layers of data files and rules to cover all the edge cases and weird stations/routes. It's been really fun to dig into it.
I'll look into adding more possible connections to see if it can find the Penzance route - I'd be curious to know if anyone has ever actually completed the 27 hour journey!
I'd love to support more countries, but from what I can tell it's a mammoth task. Every country publishes rail data in different ways - there are aggregator APIs to join them up, but they don't come cheap.
I've been working on a tool to solve a problem I keep seeing at my day job when handling large-scale deployments and migrations. The “plan” is always scattered across internal docs, spreadsheets, and Slack threads. Coordinating work across multiple teams becomes messy fast
So I'm building Taskplan (https://taskplan.run) - it's like Ansible, but for people. Build a plan, assign tasks to people or teams, and get a real-time dashboard to track progress as the work happens.
I'd love feedback from anyone who deals with the same issues or works on ops-heavy projects.
When booking flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner that let you do flexible searches - multiple destinations, 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 building my own route planner that runs completely offline in the browser. This gave me the freedom to implement more complex filters, search to/from multiple stations, and do it without a persistent network connection.
Now I'm finding routes that aren't offered by the standard train operators, connecting at different stations, and finding it's often easier to travel to different stations (some I'd never heard of) that get me closer and faster to where I actually want to go!
It's still a little rough and I'd like to add more features such as fares, VSTP data, and direct-links to book tickets, but wanted to share early and get some initial feedback before investing more time into it. So, thanks in advance - let me know what you think.