Worldwide Rail Network Map
openrailwaymap.org
openrailwaymap.org
When we were kids, my brother studied a railroad atlas any time he wasn't in school or church. This thing was a monster, large book with hundreds of pages of maps. Literally county by county across the Unites States, all railroad lines and yards. I'd go to sleep Friday night while he sat in an overstuffed chair, studying. I'd wake up at 7:30 AM Saturday... he hadn't moved. Still there, a few pages further into the atlas.
As an adult, he worked for the Illinois Central as a hump yard operator. Later the Iowa Pacific, and ultimately found himself doing customer service for a small line in Texas, mainly shipping sand. His job frequently included finding 'lost' cars somewhere in the US, on any line that happened to be in that car's route. He was really good at it.
One notable call had him searching railroad yards in Missouri. He had a strong hunch that the misplaced car was on a spur where that yard stored cars that had lost their way. But he needed to confirm. He could have called that yard, but getting the right person to check logs or go hunt was always a hassle. So... He Googled up the yard, zoomed in on the spur and noted that Google helpfully displayed several businesses in a strip mall backed up to the spur. He dialed up 'Patty's Nail Salon' and the call went something like: "Hi Patty, this is Craig with the Iowa Pacific. I'm tracking down a misplaced car and I have reason to believe it is sitting on the spur outside your back window. Would you mind checking for a car with ID 123876?"
Extended pause....
"I'll be right back!"
Sure enough, there is was.
Was he memorizing names? Routes? Charting different paths?
I had a lot of childhood hobbies that didn't pan out so well. For example, I used to memorize scientific names of insects and other creepy-crawlies. Mostly I did this because I wanted to learn more Latin and they weren't teaching it in Catholic school. Also my father, a geologist, worked with a full-time entomologist in his office.
My parents allowed me more or less free hand in self-determination of hobbies and recreational activities, and this was detrimental to my growth and work ethic. If you're a parent, make sure that your children's activities are focused and directed to some meaningful end. Also ensure that they are properly motivated, encouraged, and supported in constructive things. This is the best way to form children who are good workers with interesting careers.
To be perfectly frank it sounds like your conclusion is an over correction.
Our schooling was stable but our extracurriculars were not. I entered Scouting, soccer, religious education, and all sorts of things and I was yanked out of them all, very quickly and unceremoniously. We never got an explanation of why we quit but it wasn't our fault and it wasn't our choice. So me and my sister became accustomed to this inconstancy and nobody cared about our development as well-rounded team players or good citizens.
I learned lots of science and technology at my dad's elbow, but what I didn't learn was his work ethic or devotion to family or other masculine qualities like that. What I did was by imitation and mimicry. Mom and Dad served us and did all the chores for us, so laundry, cooking, dishes, cleaning was either done by them or not done at all.
It wasn't until high school when I joined the band and found camaraderie, a sense of belonging, and achievement; I stuck with the band for all four years and earned awards there. It was a great loss when I graduated and couldn't continue as a saxophonist and I lost all the friends I'd gained. Band didn't really relate to my target career in IT and so it had to fall by the wayside (requiring a very expensive saxophone that the parents were unwilling to purchase, too.) So I entered college with zero extracurricular activities again.
I dropped out of college--several times--and I was impelled to accept a decent entry-level IT job during the dotcom boom, which launched a pseudo-career for several years. I was unprepared for that, and so I lost all jobs and I lost everything else too. Being accustomed to quitting and losing made these turns unsurprising but not any less painful.
So yeah, if you teach your children to stick around and build skills through hobbies, chores, and activities, then they will thank you for it later. If you continually yank them out of stuff, and treat them like hotel guests or pets, they will not develop a work ethic or an appreciation for the dignity of a job well done, and they will be set up for failure in life. I learned these lessons quite late in life.
> This is the best way to form children who are good workers with interesting careers.
No way. Its OK to just be alive and be a human hurtling through space on this rock.
Its OK to do something just to do it and childhood / adolescent behaviors are for experimenting not training.
Sorry you feel you were led astray.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15965912 (Dec 20, 2017) 58 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29950286 (Jan 15, 2022) 15 comments
My guess is, whoever made this, based it on the idea that trains and subways are different things. They aren't in Japan. For example the Mirai-Line (subway), The Tokyu Tokoyo-Line (train), Eiden-Fukutoshin-line (subway), Tobu Tojo Line (train) can all share the same cars and some "cars" run all 4 lines where other cars run just their own line.
I'm not sure what the definition of "subway" vs "train" is. In Japan it's certainly not "runs underground vs runs above ground". Even in NYC all the trains run for a long ways underground to get to Central or Penn station.
It's also certainly not "need a harder to get ticket than just use a transit pass" as pretty all the trains lines in Japan except for a few super express trains can be ridden just by starting with the cheapest ticket you got out of a generic ticket machine and paying the difference when you get off". So for example you can ride the San-Yo line 333 miles (537km) and it's just a normal hop on, hop off train. you don't have to go to some ticket booth/kiosk and reserve a seat like you would for say an ICE train in Europe or the bullet train in Japan
This is based on OSM data, so the definition on the wiki should be used: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:railway%3Dsubway (which isn't very specific).
“Train” usually refers to that equipment that is compatible with the larger national mainline network, which is regulated nationally so that signaling, size, and safety are consistent (e.g. two trains from different companies crashing into each other is not a disaster, they fit on each others’ tracks and stations, they can talk together on the same radio frequency and hook into the same cab signals, etc.)
Metros tend to be isolated systems doing their own thing and are not easily compatible. In the most extreme case like London Underground, they are wildly different dimensions than mainline trains.
Tokyo does have lines like these in its subway umbrella; the Ginza Line and Oedo Line cannot host through operations. It’s not common though, Japan is at the forefront of blending the two, which is often desirable for intraurban operations.
Though on the other hand especially in the case of the London Underground the boundaries are actually quite blurry, too.
First of all it's only the deep tubes that are running those noticeable smaller trains, and even then the Bakerloo line nevertheless actually has some through-running onto the mainline railway network, too (Queen's Park – Harrow & Wealdstone).
Secondly, the subsurface lines have some more through-running (District Line to Wimbledon and Richmond and most noticeable the Metropolitan Line north of Harrow-on-the-Hill) and historically, the boundary between the Underground lines and the mainline network used to be even fuzzier, e.g. for a time some District Line trains used to run all the way to Southend and Shoeburyness, beyond today's Circle Line the so-called Middle and Outer Circle services partially ran on mainline railway infrastructure in West London, etc. etc.
Even as late as 1988 there was a special railtour on the subsurface lines utilising standard Gatwick Express Mk2 railway carriages (albeit hauled by London Underground battery locomotives).
Ultimately rail isn’t really a bunch of distinct categories but really a multiplane continuum of various features that people choose to implement or not implement based on local context, desirability and feasibility.
I think Openrailwaymap started out as a German project ("Bahnkarte") and it might still be somewhat German-dominated to this day (?)… – and in Germany there is indeed a clear legal split between mainline railways and subways, because the latter are built and operated according to the regulations that are also applicable for trams/streetcars, while the former have their own set of applicable laws and regulations.
So that relatively hard split might have coloured the world view of the Openrailwaymap creators somewhat in that regard…
(Though even in Germany there are some edge cases – the Hamburg and Berlin S-Bahn systems are legally railways and have some, albeit only limited interaction with the rest of the mainline network (respectively in the case of Hamburg some actual through-running again as of a few years ago), but in regards of operations and signalling they're (especially historically) in some ways more closely related to other rapid transit networks than to the rest of the mainline railway. I notice that in Openstreetmap those networks are currently tagged as "light rail", which with regards to the distinction from the regular mainline network might not be that inaccurate, but on the other hand is equally confusing, because "light rail" can mean loads of things:
- historically in the UK minor branch railways built according to simplified rules and regulations – but still railways in spirit – were called light railways
- these days it gets commonly used for anything between basically souped-up trams (sometimes not even all that souped-up) and full-scale rapid transit-type rail (which at other times is actually termed "heavy metro" if you want to distinguish it from "lesser" light railways)
- due to differing crash strength regulations and the historic US approach of "buff strength over alles", some types of (albeit light-weight) European main-line multiple units are seemingly classified as tram-train/light rail operations in the US )
Many thanks to the team
Have done Singapore to Shanghai overland, but there was a lot of terrifying busrides inbetween lines.
On that route, there are only a few relatively short stretches where there's no train. I had to get local drivers across the Thai - Myanmar and Myanmar - India border, and through northeast India to the Bangladesh border, and I walked across the Iran - Turkey border as the train wasn't running. The whole rest of the route, I was on trains.
The Laos train is indeed exciting. If/when China comes to their senses w.r.t Covid and Russia w.r.t invading their neighbours, it would be interesting to repeat the trip the northern way.
I did the long way round via Cambodia/Vietnam rather than through Thailand/Sichuan province, the map says there is a train now between Hanoi and Nanning but when I went it was 10+ hours on a bus including a lengthy golf buggy ride between no-mans-land with a 18yo kid armed with an AK at the Chinese border.
The bus trip between Phnom Penh and HCMC was utterly terrifying, we spent a quarter of the trip on the wrong side of the road with the driver holding down the horn to make oncoming traffic move out of the way, bigger vehicle and all that. There was an American couple trying to pay the driver to slow down but that just made him more angry. Really makes you appreciate a good sleeper train or plane.
The people doing the permit in Yangon were quite serious about it, but the actual border was incredibly laid back. I walked across after stamping out of Myanmar in Tamu, and the buildings on the India side of the border were all closed for the weekend, so I kept walking to Moreh and found a policeman, who went and found the immigration guy at home so that I could get stamped in.
This website can also show a route particular train takes in India fairly accurately. For example here is route map of Vivek express, covering longest distance, 4,218.6 kilometres (2,621.3 mi) in single journey [2].
[1] https://indiarailinfo.com/atlas
[2] https://indiarailinfo.com/train/map/route-dibrugarh-kanniyak... [2]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31017135
I posted a comment in that thread about some old SF Peninsula and South Bay routes, along with the USGS topo map page where you can discover what was in any area of the US at any particular year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31036776
Enjoy!
I'll also have a look myself tomorrow.
But that data is less complete and only shows route names at high zoom levels
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=51.58248&...
https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=51.58248&...
Last time I went home I bought a 3 month NSW regional rail pass, which will also get you to Brisbane and Melbourne.
Nearly 70% of my booked trips were replaced with buses. One from Sydney to Canberra ended up being 7 hours long, the train takes 3. Pretty disappointing.
High Speed rail has been discussed for decades now, huge studies and inquiries, the route is basically decided, but it was always deemed "too expensive". Note that we spent 3x the cost of a 10 year Melbourne to Brisbane HSR system in 2021 on covid cash handouts.