How Far Can You Go in Five Hours? Or on a Single Train?

Screenshot of chronotrains-eu.vercel.app
Screenshot

Benjamin Tran Dinh (previously) has built an interactive isochrone map of Europe that shows you how far you can go by train from a given station in five hours (assuming a connection time of 20 minutes, which is an approximation: generous if same-station, less so if you have to cross the city). The map updates as you move the pointer across it, which is a lot of fun.

The isochrones are generated from data from the direct.bahn.guru site, a site that is worth looking at in and of itself: it shows all the direct connections from a given station, i.e., everywhere you can get to on a single train. That site, in turn, gets its data from the Deutsche Bahn via a legacy API that is necessarily incomplete and only covers destinations reachable from Germany. But there are no complete datasets of European transport routes, so this’ll do. [Maps Mania]