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

56 points by mgranados 4 days ago

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. Discuss on news.ycombinator.com

25 comments:

by TheOtherHobbes an hour ago

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

by mgranados 42 minutes ago

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

by hokkos an hour ago

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

by taylorius 20 minutes 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.

by mgranados 38 minutes ago

thank you! i'll have a look

by darknavi an hour 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.

by mgranados 37 minutes 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

by dmazin 2 hours ago

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

by uukelele an hour ago

And the Reading branch of the Elizabeth line

by mgranados 36 minutes ago

thanks for feedback i'll have a look!

by fredley 3 hours ago

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

by sdoering 2 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?

by mgranados 33 minutes ago

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

by ohjeez an hour ago

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

by kentonv 3 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.

by mgranados 29 minutes ago

thanks! that's a great suggestion will implement

by Falimonda 2 hours ago

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

by mgranados 31 minutes ago

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

by Leewen 41 minutes ago

model rough but amazing. i cant do this

by jrrv 2 hours ago

The planes were a surprise

by mgranados 31 minutes ago

hehe thanks!

by philipwhiuk 2 hours ago

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

by 0l 2 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

by gowld 2 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.

by mgranados 26 minutes ago

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

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