Comments on: Sleeper – mapping European night trains

By: Hibai Unzueta

Hibai Unzueta — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 07:51:48 +0000

Thank you very much for the tool and developing this idea. I have been thinking about this for a long time but never had the time nor the ability to build it. I was amazed that you did, and specially thankful for building an api for the excellent Deutsche Bahn travel planner.

Well, thank you! And keep up the good work!

By: Istria

Istria — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 16:53:51 +0000

wow, great tool thank you!

By: matt

matt — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 20:15:58 +0000

Hi Mike – glad you’ve found it useful! (I’ve just got back from a trip to Krakow in fact, and for the first time I took a sleeper train that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise, so it feels worth the effort now :-) )

I guess you’ve noticed a lot of the limitations of the site – it was never really intended to be a complete route-planning tool to compete with the big sites like Deutsche Bahn, just a little visual aid to help with your own manual research – and so there are inevitably corners being cut here and there. In particular, the station view only shows links to neighbouring stations (so at least you know it’s possible to take a train in roughly the right direction!)

However, shortly after I built the site, I did manage to come up with a full map view, which you can see at http://sleeper.demozoo.org/map – I never linked to it, because I wasn’t fully happy with the way it looked (especially all the straight lines across France – to fix those, I think I’d have to start spidering local train routes, and guessing which tracks the non-stop night trains are most likely to follow). I can’t see myself improving it any time soon though, so I guess I’ll add that link now…

By: mike

mike — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 16:13:47 +0000

really handy tool.

whilst you may not be able to render a google map of the whole european network – couldn’t you just make a jpeg programatically once, then keep it as a static image on your site? seems like an obvious thing for someone to have made – but I can’t find it anywhere.

http://sleeper.demozoo.org/stations/752
this station goes to barcelona (according the data on the right) yet its not drawn on the map ? why!

and then it would be fantastic if you could do some routing – like i want to go from barcelona to moscow via a series of trains. what are my options?

all that aside; its still very useful – thanks

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 11:02:25 +0000

Jamie will be pleased!

By: Carl

Carl — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:49:31 +0000

And thanks from the environment that it’s not “FlightPath”! I can see this being the start of a glorious series of “intended use” pieces of software â€” Guitar management in Django, anyone? Also a boon for those of us that love terrible puns; “stops short” is good, other suggestions include “the right track” or maybe a comparison of how it _fares_ on your next journey? … *tumbleweed*

By: Eq

Eq — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:09:57 +0000

Thank you for not calling it “Sleepr”.