About World Train Map
World Train Map is working on drawing every passenger train in the world that you can buy a ticket for and ride, on the track it really uses. Each route carries its length, its fastest journey, who runs it, the year the line opened and a short story. Bergensbanen, for example: Oslo to Bergen, 496 km, 6 h 30 min with Vy, open since 1909.
Today that is 1,562 routes in 120 countries, about 353,800 km of line, and more go on every week. What you will not find: freight-only lines, closed railways and lines still being built. A route goes on only once a scheduled train runs on it. That is the difference from a map drawn straight from OpenStreetMap, which shows every railway, including many that carry no passenger train any more.
Most of Europe and Japan are drawn in depth. Much of Asia, Africa and the Americas is still thin, so a blank area usually means a railway not drawn yet, not a country without trains.
AI helps write the code, gather the data and check it. Each route’s page says what its line was checked against: the track OpenStreetMap maps, the operator’s timetable where one answers, and the sources behind its facts.
Who keeps it
The map is made by one person, under the pseudonym Mr. Flightmussy. Every visible change is dated and credited in the changelog (with an Atom feed). Contact: ceoflightmussy@gmail.com.
I am the creator of the website Movie Scene Map. First of all, I want to thank all and each of you wherever in the world you come from.
Flightmussy Studio
A studio for interactive maps: World Train Map, Castle Map and Movie Scene Map.
studioflightmussy.com
More maps from the same creator
Movie Scene Map, Castle Map, Sunshine Atlas, World Beach Map and Detourmap are made and run by Mr. Flightmussy, the creator of World Train Map, at Flightmussy Studio. The same method, on a different subject.
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Movie Scene Map
Where films and series were shot, and where games are set
moviescenemap.com
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Castle Map
Castles, fortresses and palaces worldwide
thecastlemap.com
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Sunshine Atlas
Sunshine, temperature and rain for destinations worldwide, month by month
sunshineatlas.com
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World Beach Map
Notable beaches worldwide and their sea temperatures
beachmapworld.com
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Detourmap
Natural wonders and ancient sites worth the detour
detourmap.com
How a route gets on the map
Three rules decide what goes on:
- It must be a scheduled passenger service you can ride today. No freight lines, no closed railways; a line under construction waits for its first train.
- Each railway is drawn once. A train that runs entirely on track another route already draws is folded into that route, which is why the Glacier Express and the local trains of the Rhône and Rhine valleys share one line.
- Every line is drawn from real track and then measured against it, and its route page says how.
Readers suggest new routes all the time, above all on the OpenStreetMap and RailUK forums. Since September 2026 a sweep also reads the passenger train routes mapped in OpenStreetMap and asks a journey planner whether a scheduled train still runs them. Each one it finds still needs an opening year with a source, read from the line’s own article in its own language, before it goes on.
The facts on each card are approximate published figures from operators, timetables and Wikipedia, not live schedules. For today’s times and tickets ask the operator or a planner such as bahn.de, which covers far more than Germany.
The route facts are open data under CC BY 4.0, archived with a DOI (OSM-traced geometry stays © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL), and the map can be embedded on any site for free.
How much of it has been checked
Every route page says what could be shown about its line, under “How this line was checked”. The table adds those claims up. Each one is a record, not a judgement: where there is no record, the page says nothing rather than something weaker.
- Drawn from a named OpenStreetMap relation
- 1414 of 1562 routes
- Measured against real OpenStreetMap track
- 1561, sitting a median 4 m from it
- …of those, on track from end to end
- 1262
- Checked against a live running timetable
- 850
- Carrying a Wikipedia article
- 1340
- With a list of their stations
- 1209
You can check the drawings yourself. The map has a switch, OpenStreetMap railways, that draws the real railway under every route, 1,735,000 km of it in three shades. The brightest is track a route here is drawn from. The middle shade is a railway OpenStreetMap describes end to end that this atlas has no route for yet: 543 of them. The faintest is every other railway OpenStreetMap knows, 997,000 km, which is what tells a blank patch that says “no railway here” from one that says “not drawn yet”. Where one of our lines leaves the grey one, ours is wrong, and you can see where.
Two kinds of check appear in the table. “Drawn from a relation” says where a line came from: someone who knows the railway listed its track in OpenStreetMap, and our line is built from their points; the route page links the relation, so you can open it and disagree. “Measured against real track” says where the line actually lies: 1386 routes were walked in ten-kilometre legs on a router that can only travel along OpenStreetMap track, and our drawing was compared with what came back, in metres. The other 175 are lines that router has never heard of, funiculars, forest railways and narrow gauge, so they were measured against the nearest mapped track instead, a weaker answer, and their pages say so.
Until August 2026 this page also claimed that most lines were “traced onto the OpenStreetMap rail graph”, on the strength of how a tool rounds coordinates. That was a fingerprint of a tool, not evidence, and it was removed. The licence is unchanged: much of this geometry comes from OpenStreetMap, so the ODbL attribution stays.
Errors get fixed
An atlas of 1,562 routes will contain mistakes. Any error or omission can be reported, and it is usually fixed within a day, then dated and credited in the changelog: 551 changes so far.
Found one? Email ceoflightmussy@gmail.com, open an issue on the dataset’s GitHub repo, or mention it wherever the atlas is being discussed.
Featured in
Articles and posts
Voted onto the front page of
Carried by
None of the write-ups was pitched or paid for. Each logo belongs to its owner and links to what they published, where it is still online; the Lemmy logo is by Andy Cuccaro (AGPL-3.0).
Particular thanks
The members of both forums have made this atlas measurably better with their corrections and route suggestions. The OpenStreetMap logo is by Ken Vermette (CC BY-SA 3.0).