Hacker News

82 points by mgranados 5 days ago | 29 comments

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.

IIAOPSW 32 minutes ago

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.

Pigo 33 minutes ago

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.

darknavi 3 hours ago

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.

mgranados 2 hours ago

I saw a project like that here in hn recently for all uk trains even. it'd be pretty cool to extend this to support that, busy stations might be visually confusing, thanks for suggestions

TheOtherHobbes 3 hours ago

Interesting but quite buggy. Example: mouse dragging seems trapped in a fairly small area.

mgranados 3 hours ago

Ah yeah i tried anchoring to the train with a threshold for panning around i'll try smoothing it. thanks for trying it!

ampdepolymerase 47 minutes ago

Can you add support for touch?

dmazin 4 hours ago

It would appear you are missing the High Barnet branch of the Northern line.

uukelele 3 hours ago

And the Reading branch of the Elizabeth line

mgranados 2 hours ago

thanks for feedback i'll have a look!

fredley 4 hours ago

Very nice, but the map seems to be in the wrong position vs. the trains/3d elements.

hokkos 3 hours ago

There seems to be some parallax issues between your trip layer and your 3D Tiles layer, but nice usage of deck.gl.

taylorius 2 hours ago

Is it not that certain train lines are somewhat deep underground? The Piccadilly line swims with respect to the ground in the centre of town, when it is below ground. Further out where lines are at the surface the routes stick to the ground correctly.

mgranados 3 hours ago

thank you! i'll have a look

sdoering 4 hours ago

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?

mgranados 2 hours ago

<3 thanks!! i'll clean it and share here sometime soon

kentonv 4 days ago

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 2 hours ago

thanks! that's a great suggestion will implement

ohjeez 3 hours ago

This is incredibly cool. I had it open on my desktop for most of the day.

adecoster 58 minutes ago

A bit buggy in term of tiles jonctions

Falimonda 3 hours ago

How do I drive the train? Arrow keys not working :(

mgranados 2 hours ago

It's just following api data for now. That'd be a real cool feature for backlog!

Leewen 3 hours ago

model rough but amazing. i cant do this

jrrv 4 hours ago

The planes were a surprise

mgranados 2 hours ago

hehe thanks!

philipwhiuk 4 hours ago

I'm curious what the 3D model source is - the Gherkin is kinda weird.

0l 4 hours ago

OpenStreetMap - seems to be done with concentric circles, e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/1365317072 and a dome on top

There is a good wiki page on this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Simple_3D_Buildings

gowld 4 hours ago

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.

mgranados 2 hours ago

I meant to make it feel like the tube ones felt "underground" by some metres i'll have a look thanks