About RailLineage
See how a city's rail network grew, on a real map, from its first line to today.
What it is
RailLineage shows the rail networks of 23 cities on a real map, in 2D or 3D. Pick any date to see a network as it stood that day, or press play and watch it grow, one change at a time. Some cities have never built a network: for those, you can explore what was planned.
It is an independent project, and it isn't connected to any city or transit operator.
What you can do
- See any day
- Move through the timeline to see which lines and stations were open on that date.
- Play the history
- Watch the network grow from its first line to today, one change at a time.
- Browse lines and stations
- Look up every line and station, and the changes that shaped the network.
- Find a route
- Compare up to three ways between two stations, each with an estimated journey time.
- Check your reach
- See how far you can get from a station, by time.
- Measure coverage
- See how much of the city is within walking distance of a station, and how that changed over the years.
- Read the numbers
- Follow the network's growth in charts, and see its records on the date shown.
- Open a plan
- See what could come next, or what never happened: projects under construction, planned, proposed, at concept stage or abandoned.
Where the data comes from
- OpenStreetMap: each city's track, stations and outline, and the background map's data, © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License.
- OpenFreeMap: the background map's tiles.
- OpenMapTiles: the format of those tiles.
Opening, closing and renaming dates are checked against Wikipedia's articles on each line, station and railway company.
What is estimated
The dates and networks are curated by hand, so mistakes are possible. Some things on the site are estimates by design:
- Trains on the map are an illustration. There is no timetable behind them: they run by the rules real lines follow, using published figures where they exist and fitted ones where they don't.
- Journey times use the same rules, so they are estimates. Check with the operator before you travel.
- Plans may not show a project's real route. Where its track isn't recorded, the map curves it through its stations, so treat it as a sketch.