TrainRouter Atlas — the world's legendary train routes, as open data

744 train routes · 118 countries · ≈ 366,500 km of line — every route with its key facts and hand-traced geometry, from trainrouter.com, the interactive world railway map.

High-speed spines (Eurostar, TGV, Shinkansen, AVE), classic long-distance runs (Trans-Siberian, California Zephyr), night trains (Nightjet, the Ghan) and the scenic lines people fly in just to ride (Glacier Express, Bernina Express, the Jacobite).

🗺️ Explore it interactively: trainrouter.com 🤖 Use it from an AI assistant: free MCP server at https://trainrouter.com/mcp (how to connect) — or run it from this repo: npm install && npm start (mcp/)

Files

Related MCP server: db-mcp

Schema

Quick start

import pandas as pd
routes = pd.read_csv("data/routes.csv")
routes.nsmallest(10, "fame_rank")[["name", "from", "to", "distance_km"]]

import geopandas as gpd
gdf = gpd.read_file("data/routes.geojson")
gdf.plot(column="category", figsize=(16, 8))

Accuracy & provenance

• Figures are approximate published values (operator sites, timetables, press material) — good for exploration and visualization, not operations.

• Geometry is hand-traced at map scale to follow each line's real corridor — it is not survey-grade track alignment.

• The dataset is curated: it covers the world's notable routes, not every railway line on earth.

• Not included here (they live on the site): per-route stories and sights, photos, and city-to-city journey guides.

License & attribution

CC BY 4.0 — free to use, share and adapt, with attribution to TrainRouter. A link to https://trainrouter.com (or the specific route page in url) satisfies attribution.

Also available on

• Kaggle: kaggle.com/datasets/albanius/world-train-routes-trainrouter-atlas

• Hugging Face: huggingface.co/datasets/Flightmussy/trainrouter-atlas

• Zenodo (archived, DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21322030 — always resolves to the latest version

Citing

TrainRouter Atlas: the world's legendary train routes (2026). trainrouter.com. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21322030. https://github.com/Flightmussy/trainrouter-atlas

Updating

The data is generated from the TrainRouter atlas source. New versions land here first; publishing a GitHub release mints a fresh Zenodo DOI and (once the repo's KAGGLE_API_TOKEN/HF_TOKEN secrets are configured) syncs the Kaggle and Hugging Face mirrors automatically via sync-mirrors.yml.

Also in this repo

• mcp/ — source of the TrainRouter MCP server (live at https://trainrouter.com/mcp, listed in the Official MCP Registry as com.trainrouter/atlas), which serves this atlas as tools for Claude and other MCP clients.