July 6, 2026
Trainspotting, but make it spicy
Real time map of France's rail network
France put its trains on a live map and the comments instantly turned into a rail fantasy fight
TLDR: A developer made a live map of France’s trains using public information, giving rail fans a mesmerizing look at hundreds of journeys at once. The comments quickly became the real show: envy over Europe’s easy train life, hope for a US version, and jokes about Germany doing it with a static image.
A personal project called Tchoo is serving up something weirdly irresistible: a real-time map of France’s rail network showing hundreds of trains moving around the country, built from public data and a lot of clever guesswork. The creator is very clear that it’s not official and not guaranteed to be perfect — which only made the crowd more obsessed. Because once people saw trains gliding across France on one screen, the conversation went off the rails in the best possible way.
The loudest reaction wasn’t even about code — it was about lifestyle envy. One commenter basically turned the thread into a romance novel about European train life, bragging about blasting through the countryside at 300 km/h with wine, then stepping out into a walkable city where dinner was just a few steps away. That kicked off the real subtext: people weren’t just admiring the map, they were mourning car-dependent life. Another commenter in Chicago immediately asked if the US has anything similar, hoping to build a little train-alert setup for his son — which gave the whole thread a surprisingly wholesome twist.
And of course, the nitpicks arrived right on schedule. One person suggested smoother motion to make the display prettier, while another dropped a gloriously dry jab that the German version uses less bandwidth because it’s “simply a static png.” Translation: some people saw a delightful public-data toy, others saw a fresh excuse for international rail one-upmanship. The map is cool, but the comment section became a referendum on transit, cities, and national pride.
Key Points
- •The article presents a real-time map of France’s rail network showing 772 trains at the displayed timestamp.
- •The project is a personal initiative by Nicolas Wurtz and is based exclusively on public data with no guarantee of reliability or update frequency.
- •Data sources include OpenStreetMap, SNCF Open Data, the API SNCF Open Data, Wikipedia, Wikidata, and GitHub-hosted supplemental datasets.
- •Because no public exact-position feed exists, train positions are estimated from real-time timetable data using interpolation and statistical calculations.
- •The page notes that routes are recalculated when timetable data updates, may contain errors, and that some mapping corrections can be made through OpenStreetMap.