Show HN: Follow London Trains in 3D
63 points
4 days ago
| 13 comments
| ride.nexttrain.london
| 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.
TheOtherHobbes
1 hour ago
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Interesting but quite buggy. Example: mouse dragging seems trapped in a fairly small area.
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mgranados
1 hour ago
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Ah yeah i tried anchoring to the train with a threshold for panning around i'll try smoothing it. thanks for trying it!
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darknavi
1 hour ago
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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.
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mgranados
58 minutes ago
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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
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hokkos
1 hour ago
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There seems to be some parallax issues between your trip layer and your 3D Tiles layer, but nice usage of deck.gl.
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taylorius
42 minutes ago
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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.
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mgranados
59 minutes ago
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thank you! i'll have a look
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dmazin
2 hours ago
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It would appear you are missing the High Barnet branch of the Northern line.
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uukelele
1 hour ago
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And the Reading branch of the Elizabeth line
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mgranados
58 minutes ago
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thanks for feedback i'll have a look!
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fredley
2 hours ago
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Very nice, but the map seems to be in the wrong position vs. the trains/3d elements.
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sdoering
2 hours ago
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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?

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mgranados
54 minutes ago
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<3 thanks!! i'll clean it and share here sometime soon
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kentonv
3 days ago
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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.

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mgranados
51 minutes ago
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thanks! that's a great suggestion will implement
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ohjeez
1 hour ago
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This is incredibly cool. I had it open on my desktop for most of the day.
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Falimonda
1 hour ago
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How do I drive the train? Arrow keys not working :(
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mgranados
52 minutes ago
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It's just following api data for now. That'd be a real cool feature for backlog!
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Leewen
1 hour ago
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model rough but amazing. i cant do this
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jrrv
2 hours ago
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The planes were a surprise
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mgranados
52 minutes ago
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hehe thanks!
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philipwhiuk
2 hours ago
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I'm curious what the 3D model source is - the Gherkin is kinda weird.
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0l
2 hours ago
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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

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gowld
2 hours ago
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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.
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mgranados
47 minutes ago
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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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