OpenRailRouting

Interesting. I talked to the founder of Graphhopper at some point. Nice product.

I'm currently traveling by local rail connections across Germany currently using the Germany ticket (49 euro/month, amazing value). This restricts me to local only connections and it's a nice way to see the country if you are willing to travel at a bit slower pace. I simply do 1-2 hour hops at the time and then get myself an airbnb look around a bit and then move on every few days.

One of my challenges is routing and mapping. Mostly I use the Deutsche Bahn tool for this where you simply enter where you want to go, restrict it to local connections, and then you get your route. There isn't much else that is usable. Google maps is alright for scheduling but you can't restrict it. And mostly it's transit layer is very incomplete.

What's missing is a good global map of all connections everywhere. Which would help me identify easy to get to destinations. Mostly, I'm just figuring out where to go by staring at a map and then figuring that there's probably some sort of rail or bus connection I can use to get from A to a potentially interesting B.

Fun to see someone productionize this - I've done this for years to get segments between two stations to accurately be able to render individual train services. I'll let you know that at least on national rail provider in Europe used those results for a long time...

One thing I’ve been curious about but have never dug into deeply enough to understand is what constitutes an “address” on a cargo line.

As an example, in the US, large lumberyards often sit on a rail line to receive deliveries. Often that lumber comes a long way… for instance from the Pacific Northwest to the east coast.

Maybe if I look at this project a bit I’ll understand how you slap a “To:” address on such a rail car.

How does this routing model compare to the transit options of Mapbox's and Google's API? Are there other models out there to trace train routes?