Show HN: Follow London Trains in 3D (ride.nexttrain.london)
65 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.
adecoster 6 minutes ago
A bit buggy in term of tiles jonctions
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago
Interesting but quite buggy. Example: mouse dragging seems trapped in a fairly small area.
mgranados an hour ago
Ah yeah i tried anchoring to the train with a threshold for panning around i'll try smoothing it. thanks for trying it!
darknavi 2 hours 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.
mgranados an hour 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
hokkos 2 hours ago
There seems to be some parallax issues between your trip layer and your 3D Tiles layer, but nice usage of deck.gl.
taylorius an hour 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.
mgranados an hour ago
thank you! i'll have a look
dmazin 3 hours ago
It would appear you are missing the High Barnet branch of the Northern line.
uukelele an hour ago
And the Reading branch of the Elizabeth line
mgranados an hour ago
thanks for feedback i'll have a look!
fredley 3 hours ago
Very nice, but the map seems to be in the wrong position vs. the trains/3d elements.
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?
mgranados an hour ago
<3 thanks!! i'll clean it and share here sometime soon
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.
mgranados an hour ago
thanks! that's a great suggestion will implement
ohjeez 2 hours ago
This is incredibly cool. I had it open on my desktop for most of the day.
Falimonda 2 hours ago
How do I drive the train? Arrow keys not working :(
mgranados an hour ago
It's just following api data for now. That'd be a real cool feature for backlog!
Leewen an hour ago
model rough but amazing. i cant do this
jrrv 3 hours ago
The planes were a surprise
mgranados an hour ago
hehe thanks!
philipwhiuk 3 hours ago
I'm curious what the 3D model source is - the Gherkin is kinda weird.
0l 3 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
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.
mgranados an hour ago
I meant to make it feel like the tube ones felt "underground" by some metres i'll have a look thanks