A comprehensive map of the entire UK rail network, including current and historical (closed) stations, heritage lines, freight-only curves, tunnels, and viaducts.
Raw Developer Origin & Technical Request
Hacker News
Jun 27, 2026
Author here (Nathan). The goal for this site was to map the entire UK rail network: not just
the parts a journey planner surfaces, but heritage lines, freight-only curves,
named tunnels and viaducts, and the thousands of stations that have closed and
were never mapped.The project is built entirely on open data. Lines and current stations come from
OpenStreetMap via Overpass, closed stations from Wikidata (approximately 6,100
that fall outside a 250 m radius of a live OSM station), and postcode lookups
from postcodes.io. The main challenge is that the sources rarely agree with one
another, or even with themselves, so much of the work involved small
reconciliation rules. For example, the heritage flag is propagated across every
segment sharing a line name, so the Swanage Railway is coloured consistently.I shared an early version with a railway enthusiast community, and a large share
of the fixes came from people who know the network considerably better than I do.
A full write-up of the data challenges is available here:
trainmap.co.uk/story.htmlNo account or app is required. You can search by postcode, station name,
three-letter code, or line name. Corrections are very welcome, as there is always
a station someone knows I have got wrong.
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