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

961 train routes · 118 countries · ≈ 432,800 km of route — 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))

Sources, accuracy & provenance

• Provenance changed in late July 2026 — this section was updated 2026-07-31 to say so. The atlas started fully hand-built, and the facts still are: compiled from public references, not from any licensed dataset, so the CC BY 4.0 licence on the facts is the author's to grant.

• Geometry: hand-traced originally, OSM-traced increasingly. Each route's LineString began as hand-placed [lon, lat] waypoints following the corridor at map scale. From 23 July 2026 onward, alignments have progressively been re-traced from OpenStreetMap railway ways via Overpass so the lines sit on real track. The files currently in data/ are the 23 July refresh: nearly all of their geometry is still the hand-traced kind, but a handful of corridors (Brenner, Oslo–Göteborg, Oslo–Stockholm, Pustertalbahn) are already OSM-traced, and those lines are © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL — as any OSM-derived geometry must be. An earlier version of this README said the geometry was "not extracted from OSM or any geodata source"; that was true when written (v1.0, 12 July) and is no longer true, which is why this notice exists. The next release will mark the split per route: facts CC BY 4.0, geometry ODbL.

• Facts are approximate published values: distance, top speed, journey time, operator, opening year and approximate ridership are compiled from public references (operators' own figures, timetables, press material, encyclopaedic articles). Individual facts like these aren't copyrightable; the licence covers the curated compilation. Good for exploration and visualization, not operations.

• Curated, not exhaustive: the world's notable routes, not every line on earth. Route names and the one-line highlights are the author's own wording.

• Deliberately excluded (they live only on the site, to keep provenance clean): per-route stories and sights, photos (Wikimedia Commons, separately licensed), and the city-to-city journey guides (derived from public schedule feeds).

• Basemap ≠ data: the interactive site renders these routes over OpenFreeMap (OpenStreetMap) tiles; those tiles are not part of this dataset. OSM © OpenStreetMap contributors — which, per the provenance note above, now also covers the OSM-traced route lines themselves.

License & attribution

• Facts (every non-geometry field in data/): 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. (full notice)

• Geometry (LineString coordinates): hand-traced lines as above (CC BY 4.0); OSM-traced lines © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0. If you reuse the geometry wholesale, treat it as ODbL and credit OpenStreetMap — the safe default, made explicit per route in the next release.

• Code (the MCP server in mcp/): MIT.

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.