Every railway line, station, tunnel and viaduct shown here is taken
directly from the open datasets below. The data is real and
sourced from established public bodies and the OpenStreetMap community.
Nothing on the map is invented or generated. Below is exactly where it comes
from and the software that renders it.
Data sources
The railway network geometry, names, tunnels, bridges and
line types are extracted from OpenStreetMap via the
Overpass API.
Station locations and names (including heritage-railway
stations) are taken from OpenStreetMap, the same source as the lines.
The live trains layer is derived from National Rail's
Darwin real-time train information (forecasts, formations and daily
timetables), published by the Rail Delivery Group via the Rail Data
Marketplace. Positions are estimated between timing points.
Contains data from National Rail / Rail Delivery Group.
Freight trains, signalling-based train positions and
measured speeds use Network Rail's open data feeds: train movement
reports (TRUST), train describer berth data (TD), the national
schedule, and the SMART and CORPUS reference datasets.
The unit number on a train's card, and the rest of that unit's
day, come from Network Rail's passenger train allocation and consist feed,
derived from the industry's own rolling-stock allocation system. It is a plan
rather than an observation, so the map words it as “booked”.
Contains data from Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd.
Timing point locations:
NaPTANLive train positions are worked out against TIPLOCs, the
railway's own timing point codes. Turning those into coordinates uses NaPTAN,
the Department for Transport's national dataset of public transport access
points, alongside OpenStreetMap.
How busy each station is, and the busiest destination from it,
come from ORR's Estimates of station usage. They are estimates
made from ticket sales rather than a headcount. The same source gives the
national totals behind the "people on trains right now" figure on the
stats page.
The optional "closed / former stations" layer is built from
Wikidata's record of UK railway stations no longer in service.
Wikidata, dedicated to the public domain (CC0).
Clicking a station offers a link to its Wikipedia article and
to its location on Google Maps. The article references come from
OpenStreetMap / Wikidata; the pages themselves are external.
Wikipedia content © its authors (CC BY-SA); Google Maps
© Google.
Train popups link to the service's full timetable, and
station popups to the live departure board, on Realtime Trains, an
excellent independent service that goes far deeper than this map does.
The pages are external and unaffiliated.
Realtime Trains © its operators.
Postcode-to-location lookups use the free, open-source
postcodes.io API, built on the ONS Postcode Directory.
Contains OS data © Crown copyright & database right;
Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright & database right; National
Statistics data © Crown copyright & database right
(Open Government Licence).
Software & services
The open-source library that renders the interactive map.
BSD-3-Clause licence.
Serves the railway network as vector tiles from a single file,
so a phone only ever holds the part of the network that is on screen.
BSD-3-Clause licence.
The underlying street map behind the railway. The labelled
base uses OpenStreetMap’s own tiles; the “Hide map labels”
option uses OpenFreeMap’s vector tiles, built with
OpenMapTiles
from the same OpenStreetMap data.
© OpenStreetMap contributors. OpenFreeMap
© OpenMapTiles, data from OpenStreetMap.
OpenFreeMap is run by one person, Zsolt Ero, and paid for by
donations. It asks for no key, no account and no fee, and it serves this map
every time you hide the labels. If you find that worth something, they take
sponsorship
the same way this site does.
Open Sans glyphs, used for the tunnel and viaduct labels, and for station names when a line or route is singled out.
Open Sans, Apache Licence 2.0.
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