It would be interesting to see a negative bar with station closures as well. And some way to zoom the map would be nice.
As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those.
Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....
Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization.
I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?).
Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.
Not animated, but it's fully zoomable (with variable LOD at different levels), searchable (with fuzzy matching), info popups on not just stations, but things like track speed limits, and tunnels. What I do that's really different is that I'm VERY heavily manipulating the underlying data (The pre-processing pipeline is currently at something like 12k lines of python and counting, most of it doing things like advanced network topology, so that we show the actual track layouts, which if drawn at truly geographically accurate scale would just collapse to a single line.
I'm showing tons of detail..... 3.5k+ stations, and every single track - not just the main running lines, but every siding and yard track.
It’s obvious on how much information is unnecessarily repeated. One of the main give away of AI is that the text is like an Atlantic article but worse, with very-very-very low information density. Full with sentences, paragraphs, pages which add absolutely nothing.
Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s.
Fun bit of trivia: Japanese train stations each have their own custom stamp, and if you have a piece of paper or a notebook they'll stamp it for you at the ticket booth (this is a fairly common thing to do there). If you get an A5 notebook, it's a neat way to document a trip -- one stamp for your departure station, one for your arrival.
This is awesome! The website screams claude to me. I'm not bashing it, in fact I think it's great. That was just my first thought when I opened the webpage. Good transition into the learning tool as well.
Japanese from the inaka here. My contribution to this dataset: nothing. No station in my town, never was one. The nearest line is an hour by car and it's openly next on the chopping block.
31 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 60.3 ms ] thread"[Error] SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"
As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those.
Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....
Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization.
I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?).
Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.
https://tylereaves.github.io/uk-rail-map/
Not animated, but it's fully zoomable (with variable LOD at different levels), searchable (with fuzzy matching), info popups on not just stations, but things like track speed limits, and tunnels. What I do that's really different is that I'm VERY heavily manipulating the underlying data (The pre-processing pipeline is currently at something like 12k lines of python and counting, most of it doing things like advanced network topology, so that we show the actual track layouts, which if drawn at truly geographically accurate scale would just collapse to a single line.
I'm showing tons of detail..... 3.5k+ stations, and every single track - not just the main running lines, but every siding and yard track.
Yea, it's beige though, thought in my case I'm trying to emulate (without directly copying) the feel of Ordinance Survey maps like this: https://www.muchbetteradventures.com/magazine/content/images...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_i...
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading jivx.com (see the browser console for more information).
I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why?
I also want to see if we have this information for Switzerland.
- Extremely low contrast typography
- Serif typefaces with body in sans serif
- Black + red/maroon color combo
- tiny, tiny typefaces
Has Japan ever closed a railway station?
Are the 1872 stations the first ever in Japan?
Is this a plot of all stations ever constructed or just the ones that still exist?
Has the number of stations ever gone down?
What events are corollated with building booms and what direction does the arrow of causality point?