Every notable passenger train route I could verify, drawn on one map with no basemap under it, so the rail lines themselves trace the coastlines. 1,166 routes across 119 countries, about 309,000 km of line once shared corridors are counted once.
Coloured by what kind of journey it is: 459 classic intercity, 246 scenic, 138 heritage, 135 high-speed, 108 night trains, 48 funiculars, 32 luxury cruise trains.
The geometry is the part I have spent the most time on. Route shapes are traced from OpenStreetMap railway relations and ways rather than drawn by hand, so the lines sit on real track. This week I finished a pass that put the last stragglers on their actual alignment, including a Saudi line that turned out to be running 200 km up a branch and back down again.
It is a free hobby project, no ads and no signup, and the route data is open. Corrections are genuinely welcome and get credited; forum readers have already fixed a number of errors in it.
Caveat worth stating plainly: it is a curated atlas of notable routes, not a complete inventory of the world’s railways. Somewhere like China or Germany has far more track than the routes shown here.
I’m surprised. For how densely populated India is, I expected to see more rail lines.
The OP made a rather strict selection of railways he found to be “notable” so I wouldn’t take this map to represent density by any means.
They might have more rail routes than shown on the map. Starting with the easier routes, then harder and harder and harder:)
I’d love to see a map showing costs. For instance: Is any other country charging 10x the price of an Airline ticket to reach the same destination by train, or just Canada ?
Australia that one from the south to the top and the one from the west to the east are basically tourist trains thousands of dollars for tickets.
Yes they should be under luxury train:)
How much is an airline ticket? I’ve heard of them being as cheap as 40€ but I’ve never seen a train ticket cost over 140€ for a one day trip and that is if you don’t book in advance.
Sad Brazilian noises
brazil number one in underdeveloped railway infrastructure
If you are interested in all rail infrastructure checkout OpenRailwayMap
It’s the new vector version with clickable features, now it can display routes as well. Click on a rail than you can click on the routes at the bottom of the popup.
Not curated even the slightest, just all the data, as it should be.
site doesn’t load for me, just hangs during page load
edit: ah now it did load :) just took a while
There should be a heat map to show how late trains are in the routes. Canada would just be red 🤣
GTFS Realtime has that data. For Canada this site shows the delays, currently Vancouver-Toronto train is 37 minutes late: https://maps.catenarymaps.org/?page=trip&chateau=viarail&trip=111&route=8-119&start_date=20260729#map=6.2%2F50.288%2F-92
It’s just up to programmers to create a map which displays these feeds. E.g. .for Hungary we have this site which shows delays real time: https://vonatinfo.mav.hu/ Green is less than 5 minutes late, yellow 6-14 mins, orange 14-59 mins, red more than 1 hours. This is an official site, but the data is public, so 3rd parties can build around that. That’s how Gmaps knows how much a train is late.
The problem is that not all of the lines on OpenRailwayMap are currently having passenger traffic. Perfect example of that is Albania, where they had railways during communism, but it is discontinued at the moment and will be for many years.
This project tries something else. To be factual and easy to use for the average user at the same time. The information displayed on Railrouter is a bit different, because the average user want to see different type of information.
I understand that curated data is not optimal, but I do not have a community behind me and I do not expect it either. Therefore, it will be a long time before it will be up to a similar standard to OpenRailwayMap. For someone like me, I will rather use Railrouter because it is just simpler and not to technical. I am not trying to compete against OpenRailwayMap.
Instead whenever someone is critical on forums or in the internet general, I will verify the feedback and then implement it where the user will be cited as well. Corrections log: https://trainrouter.com/corrections/
Those European train lines make my pants tighter
Wow, living in Europe, I had no idea worlds railways are so undeveloped. It’s basically just Europe and Japan with a little bit of China.
How did you decide which ones were notable?
(Also known as “why didn’t you include these two insignificant villages near where I live that nobody else has heard of”) :)
This is sad for so many reasons…
Wait why?
Look at europe, look at everywhere else, save india. Perhaps if we overlayed population centers and highway systems it would become mofre apparent.
