OSRD: Open-Source Railway Designer | Hacker News Reader

OSRD: Open-Source Railway Designer

osrd.fr

250 pointsJNRowe49 comments

This looks like a serious tool for real professionals to use. Cool! I wish they had some screenshots or videos of the process.

In the meantime, if anyone's looking for gamified railroad-building (just for fun), check out:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/

Or several more: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/tre...

Thanks for the links, I've just discovered Mashinky [1], which looks like OpenTTD with amazing graphics. So cool!

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/

Oh no, I always envisioned and drewamed about 3d extension of TTD like this. Someone finally did it. I'm doomed.

Whoa... this game looks realistic at first glance, with locomotives and carriages modeled on real-world counterparts, but when watching the demo video, the railfan in me immediately starts screaming "No! This is all wrong!" - the track grades are much too steep, the curves much too tight, and that one scene where two freight trains almost collide and then one of them stops dead with a few meters distance to the other one - that's not how it works! I mean, of course you can build a less realistic simulation game, I think in this case it's just the disconnect between the extremely realistic-looking trains behaving in an extremely unrealistic way that bothers me...

Transport Fever 2 has a strong modding community doing virtual model railroading. There are plenty of mods improving vehicle stock, physics and procedures.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1066780/images/

https://www.transportfever.net/

That's really cool! Is it a deeper simulation than games like Cities Skylines?

The gameplay is focused on logistics, so those aspects have a lot more control. I particularly enjoy that in conjunction with the model railway aesthetics.

- You build roads and railways, and stations for passengers and cargo (road/rail/air/sea) - You set up 'lines' to connect various stations, and you can specify what and how much gets loaded/unloaded at every station (or whether vehicles on that line stop there at all), and how long vehicles should wait for their cargo - You buy each vehicle and assign it to a line, and in the case of trains you also buy each component e.g. locomotives, passenger cars, stake cars, hoppers depending on what your line needs to transport

The cities grow by themselves based on the passenger transport links with other cities and the level of goods supply. There's no zoning, building water pipes, schools, or anything like that. Just the minutiae of getting things from A to B via C to pick up some more things destined for Y and Z.

The economic simulation is incredibly shallow sadly. It's a fun game and excellent creation sandbox but it's not remotely challenging or engaging outside of playing model trains. imo.

That's what I liked about Transport Fever: grading track correctly is important, hard, and expensive!

To be fair it describes itself as board game-like gameplay. The visuals are pretty but it doesn’t sound like it’s trying to be a simulator, very much a game first.

Run8 by Run8 Studios is what you want. I just busted 4 coupler knuckles during a boring meeting because I didn't watch my slack coming off while accelerating up a +0.10 grade :)

www.run8studios.com

And if you want to peak train nerd like me: raildriver.com

> And if you want to peak train nerd like me: raildriver.com

This... is amazing!!

I'd highly recommend Railway Empire (and Railway Empire 2). It's the spiritual successor to Sid Meyer's Railroads! With a fair bit more content and features.

EDIT: Railway Empire 2 is actually on sale right now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1644320/Railway_Empire_2/

What, no Simutrans?

https://www.simutrans.com/en/

Don't be put off by the, uhh, legacy graphics and quirky UI, like Dwarf Fortress it has the the depth of decades of development (and the learning curve isn't quite as murderous).

This tool was the subject of a FOSDEM talk this year, which is available as a video on FOSDEM’s website: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2052-open...

If you're interested, there's actually several other team members who made talks about different parts of the project in the "railway and open transport" track

Bending geographic maps for enhanced railway space-time diagrams: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/railways-and-open-tra...

MARECO algorithm: how to drive a train using the least amount of energy: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2650-mare...

Railway signaling: detecting conflicts in a complex world: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2665-rail...

And last year:

Automated short-term train planning in OSRD: https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osrd/

OpenStreetMap, one geographic database to rule them all?: https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osm/

Kudos for the EU (and as often, also here: France!) for supporting such initiatives to open up niche, often-invisible areas of a market to create new grounds for innovation and disruption!

It doesn't work out in all cases, but in areas where it does it silently moves society forward!

Here in Europe , a lot of former public utilities companies and the public sector in general has been really pushing niche OSS and OpenData projects in Europe.

It's not always useful (rarely actually) for the average Joe, but it's definitely cool to see them embracing OSS and OpenData.

I would have felt a tad better if such tool had originated in Switzerland rather than France.

The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency.

But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building and open sourcing something like this, I would love to see a video of it in use.

[EDIT]: I skimmed through the documentation, and I haven't found anything pertaining to monte carlo simulation of a complex railway system subject to external perturbations, as in: throw a bunch of unexpected events (accidents, breakdowns, blockages, late trains from a neighboring country entering the system, etc...) and see how well the whole network's efficiency holds under such disturbances. Maybe I am misunderstanding the purpose of the system.

[EDIT 2]: OK, found something. Such a "how well does the network do under perturbation" is not part of the feature set yet but seemed to be in the cards. From [1], in section "Operations studies / Planned features include", I read: "automated timetable robustness assessment using stochastic simulation".

[1]https://osrd.fr/en/about/use-case/#%C3%A9tudes-dexploitation

Seriously...

This is like not trusting the cooking book of an American chef because America has poor food quality. Or British chef in Britain.

Individuals' talents are not bound by their countries' failures and successes.

And comparatively the French train network is excellent, and faster than the Swiss network.

No, I'm not French at all.

> And comparatively the French train network is excellent

I don't think we're talking about the same country here.

Are you a regular user ?

"Comparatively" ?

Sure, if you compare it to the US train network or to Uganda's ... "comparatively", you can always find something to compare to that makes you look excellent.

> I don't think we're talking about the same country here.

> Are you a regular user ?

Not OP, but I am. The French railway system suffers from a few faults (like the fact that it's Paris first, or not enough capacity on some routes, especially around popular times like Friday afternoon), but is otherwise extremely good. There's very fast coverage between all big cities aligned to Paris (so Lille - Lyon - Marseille is super fast, but mostly because they are destinations linked to Paris); Marseille - Bordeaux is slow because it isn't aligned to Paris, and has to pass through bad terrain in the middle of nowhere).

In terms of coverage of % of the population with regional or high speed rail, or hell, low cost low or high speed rail, it's among the best in the world. It's only serious challengers are Spain, Italy, Japan, China.

Presuming there's a reason you excluded Germany, would you make a comparison with that system?

There's very little high speed rail in Germany, which means that longer trips are too slow to be useful.

That being said, there's very good regional and decently fast coverage. Delays are a problem due to postponed infrastructure investments though.

Thanks, that's my impression too. I wouldn't say Spain is much better, but my experience is limited.

Your stereotypes about German trains are very old. Here, take these newer ones

https://www.tiktok.com/@liamcarps/video/7083888965668932869?...

https://9gag.com/gag/aW4W0qq

Because Deutsche Bahn has been on steep decline for nearly 2 decades now and is the laughing stock of Europe right now.

Witness the calamitous state of getting the fans to stadiums during the current Euro 24.

There's a similar-but-different tool developed by SBB CFF FFS[1], it's even mentioned in the documentation of OSRD[2]. Both tools operate at different scope, if we're to believe the documentation (OSRD is micro, Netzgrafik is macro).

[1]: https://github.com/SchweizerischeBundesbahnen/netzgrafik-edi...

[2]: https://osrd.fr/en/docs/explanation/netzgrafik-editor/

There are also similar, commercial closed source systems from SISCOG[1][2]

[1] https://www.siscog.pt/en-gb/ [2] https://www.siscog.pt/en-gb/products/#railnode

OP wanted something developed by the Swiss railways company though (but SISCOG seems to be used by the Dannish, Finnish, Norwegian, Canadian and Catalonian railways).

You can put it on a different way, the Swiss have no use case for such a software since everything is running fine. On the other hand, the French need the solution and are more experienced dealing with railway traffic problems.

Bern <-> Zürich begs to differ

I know I don't understand the domain at all, but I'm surprised that in this day and age you'd want a distributed system to do railway design. What aspect of the problem makes it unsuitable for running in a single process?

Do you mean this? https://osrd.fr/en/docs/explanation/containers-architecture/

Could it just be the skillset that government has to? Web devs are a dime a dozen and you can probably find people to maintain/incrementally upgrade parts of it in the future easier than you could find an expert in some desktop GUI language (like .NET or Swift) that would still work after a few years of OS updates.

The web interface I get, but you can stand up a web interface with a single process built with a web server & an embedded database.

That's true. I don't know enough about their stack or use case or users to comment any further though, so I'll refrain from speculating.

EDIT2: https://osrd.fr/en/docs/reference/architecture/services/ describes it better than I did :)

EDIT: The goals of OSRD include realtime cooperation between multiple entities, including timetabling and planning on short term. Thus somewhat more complex application that is "multiplayer".

Part of the issue is that desktop application delivery can be troublesome, logistic wise (especially now with various cross-platform environments dying off), so if you want to serve as wide group as possible with minimal logistical hassle, web might be the way.

Then you might end up building it multiprocess because it's not like you have a monolith once you have complex browser-side state...

The database needs to be shared between multiple actors: several teams of multiple people working in different companies. For instance, a team may be working on a single project such as a new railway or a large timetable change. Another example would be multiple freight companies requesting new routes.

Additionally, the UI contains complicated elements such as custom maps with the railway network and custom graphs to visualize trains. There is a large ecosystem to implement this kind of stuff via Web technologies. A webapp also removes the need to distribute an installable binary on many different platforms (some may be quite restricted due to company policies) and many different machines (there are many users, see above).

Note that the system uses a client-server architecture but isn't really distributed.

> Note that the system uses a client-server architecture but isn't really distributed.

Yeah, I kind of agree. The thing is, it's orchestrating multiple containers to do the job. I can't figure out why you couldn't just have one container.

Part of the answer is that some of these services need to be scaled horizontally to be able to handle a significant number of users (e.g. tile servers, the core server), another part of the answer is architectural constraints (e.g. the core server needs to keep quite a bit of per-infrastructure data in RAM).

(Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.)

> (Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.)

Having done both, I'm always surprised when people say that it is more difficult to handle running N-copies of the same container than a heterogeneous set of containers. Sure, at really large scale you can glean efficiencies from it (which is why one might do it), but there's a lot of complexity that comes with that.

Read the architectural description - it does mention why and how.

Yeah, I read it. It says: "It is a multi-service architecture where several software components interact with each other. This choice was made to ensure the modularity of the code and to guarantee the exploitability of certain OSRD services by external applications"

Modularity of code is a common explanation for using a multi-service architecture, but it's not a particularly strong one (services are just one way of modularizing code). In terms of OSRD services being accessed by external applications, it doesn't seem like that would work particularly well, given the coupling between the pieces. The only pieces that would make any sense to me for outside applications to directly in would be the PostgreSQL database... and if that were the plan, I'd just host the whole thing in PostgreSQL.

If you read deeper, you'd find out that for example the simulation engine is a separate (older?) system written in Java that does have an API but does not implement other components like designing the railroad system etc.

There you go! Now I get it. Thanks.

Very cool!

How hard is it to use though for someone without a real technical skill set ?

This appears to be governement software for Serious People doing Serious Work so I'm guessing... not very.

Shouldn't be too hard, the tool is designed to be intuitive. That said, it may not be obvious how to use the planning part of the tool if you're not familiar with trains.

The README contains instructions to start OSRD with docker-compose, if you want to try it out. Would be nice to have a public demo instance for sure!

Looking forward to enjoying simulations of existing train networks

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