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Show HN: Follow London Trains in 3D (ride.nexttrain.london)

156 points by mgranados ↗ HN
deck.gl based visualiser of the TFL Api + National Rails to be able to track (with minimal drift) a train along the way in London and to the nearest airports. If you pick one from any platform in https://nexttrain.london basically you can share your train journey along the rails. Build to test Cloudflare workers and their infra along with deck.gl performance that is incredible in my opinion.

34 comments

[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 61.9 ms ] thread
kentonv
This is really cool!

Quick suggestion: When not tracking a train, the mouse wheel should zoom into / out from where the cursor is pointing, rather than the center of the window.

mgranados
thanks! that's a great suggestion will implement
fredley
Very nice, but the map seems to be in the wrong position vs. the trains/3d elements.
philipwhiuk
I'm curious what the 3D model source is - the Gherkin is kinda weird.
jrrv
The planes were a surprise
dmazin
It would appear you are missing the High Barnet branch of the Northern line.
gowld
The train paths are drawn on a 2D layer above the buildings, not at z-index that matches the proper 3-D position. So the paths appear to weave around and over the tops of buildings.
sdoering
Having just taken the Elisabeth Line to LHR T5 and sitting here, this was fun. Thanks.

Edit: Is there a Repo to look at and learn from this?

Falimonda
How do I drive the train? Arrow keys not working :(
darknavi
I'd love to see a view with all/many trains. In London I was constantly wondering what the criss-cross of underground lines looked like.
ohjeez
This is incredibly cool. I had it open on my desktop for most of the day.
TheOtherHobbes
Interesting but quite buggy. Example: mouse dragging seems trapped in a fairly small area.
hokkos
There seems to be some parallax issues between your trip layer and your 3D Tiles layer, but nice usage of deck.gl.
Leewen
model rough but amazing. i cant do this
adecoster
A bit buggy in term of tiles jonctions
Pigo
This is a fun idea and interesting implementation. I know there's only so much an api can give you, but I'd love to see anything that gives more information or visuals of the surroundings.
IIAOPSW
This is frustratingly close to amazing. Obviously you went through all the trouble of pulling all the data from all the trains and displaying them in 3d, but then lock our view on to just one train or one station while all that interesting information zips around in the periphery. The view port needs to be more free form...less on rails.
tamimio
Neat! I chose victoria one and it was flying over the buildings!
Eduard
using Google Pixel 7a with Chrome Android.

while the 3d buildings render properly, the trains' polygons have a flipped z-order: polygons that are supposed to be layered behind are actually in front.

nevertheless, great website!

Liquidor
This is scary. I literally just had a dream last night wishing I could see the metro trains from above the ground in order to follow where the tunnels are under the buildings and all that. Wow.
eMPee584
Like on most other digital maps today, what's direly missing is a scale bar.. cool feat though, thanks for showing!
Rophlock
Congratulations, it seems very cool.

It's not the same, but I've tried to create a free browser-based app to track bus lines where I live (Brazil), but I had to pause this project, as each city uses a different way to track their public transportation, and it would be hard to gather all the info in a way to be usable in the whole country.

It's nice to see something similar implemented to track the transportation in another country.

purplecats
the tracks arent grounded to the map, they slide all over, and would it cool if we could use satellite view
modeless
The rendering is a bit weird. It's disorienting to have the trains simultaneously underneath the map and occluding it. It also seems like the z-buffer is not being used correctly when rendering the train cars.