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Their blog about this recently is here: https://loco2.com/blog/more-powerful-rail-journey-planning

Reading between the lines it seems they license the Hacon API from Deutsche Bahn

Yeah it's the Hacon API like http://www.thetrainline-europe.com/ use. That is not the raw data but a journey-planning API. You need to spend 15k to become a licensed Deutsche Bahn partner and then pay Hacon per query. But the Captain Train post seems to be talking about them doing their own journey planning from raw schedule data. I just want to know how they got it when no-one else including Loco2 can get it.

Update from CaptainTrain in the comments in my reply to where do you get the data:

"It’s magic. :) To be honest, this is a strategic topic we can’t comment on. I’m sorry."

i.e they have it via a backdoor - someone is giving them it who shouldn't or they're scraping it.

The backdoors aren't hard to guess BTW - one noteable source is reverse engineering the HaCon offline products.

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