atlas

World Train Map 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 its geometry, from worldtrainmap.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: worldtrainmap.com 🤖 Use it from an AI assistant: free MCP server at https://worldtrainmap.com/mcp (how to connect), or run it from this repo: npm install && npm start (mcp/)

The site was renamed. It was TrainRouter at trainrouter.com until 11 August 2026 and is now World Train Map at worldtrainmap.com. The old domain redirects path for path, so old links still work, and https://trainrouter.com/mcp still answers directly rather than redirecting, because JSON-RPC clients do not follow redirects. Nothing you already had configured has broken. The repository, the Zenodo DOI and the MCP registry name (com.trainrouter/atlas) keep their old identifiers on purpose: renaming them would break more than it would tidy.

Which version holds what

Several different route counts are in circulation for this atlas, so here is the honest map of them.

Where	Routes	Cut	Note
The live site	1,338	today	worldtrainmap.com, always the newest
The MCP server	1,247	11 August 2026	deployed separately from the site, so it lags it a little
data/ in this repo, and Hugging Face	961	23 July 2026	what you get by cloning or downloading here
Zenodo (the citable DOI)	744	12 July 2026	release v1.1.0, the last tagged one

Why the download is behind the site, and it is deliberate. Since late July the route geometry has been progressively re-traced from OpenStreetMap railway relations, which makes it a derivative of OSM data under ODbL, while this package is licensed CC BY 4.0 throughout. Publishing a refresh before the licence is split per route would ship a licence violation with our name on it, so the exporter is blocked until that work lands. See Sources, accuracy & provenance below. If you want something fresher than the July cut without waiting, the MCP server is the closest available.

Files

File	Contents
data/routes.csv	One row per route, all facts, no geometry
data/routes.json	Same records with structured country objects
data/routes.geojson	LineString per route (lon/lat waypoints) plus all facts as properties

Schema

Field	Type	Notes
id	string	Stable slug, e.g. glacier-express
name	string	Route/service name
from, to	string	Terminus cities
category	enum	In this cut: high-speed · classic · night · scenic · luxury. The live atlas adds mountain and heritage
train	string	Rolling stock, e.g. e320 · Class 374
operator	string	Operating company
distance_km	number	Route length
top_speed_kmh	number	Service top speed
duration	string	Published journey time, e.g. 2 h 16 min
opened	number	Year the line/service entered service
pax_per_year	number|null	Approx. annual ridership where published, which is rare: 80 of the 961 rows carry one
countries_iso / countries	string	|-separated, in travel order (CSV); structured objects in JSON
highlight	string	One-line description of what makes the route legendary
fame_rank	number	1 = most famous (the atlas's own renown ranking)
url	string	The route's page. These were written before the rename and still read trainrouter.com, which redirects to the same path on worldtrainmap.com; they will be rewritten in the next release

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. On the live site that re-tracing has since gone much further, which is why the site's routes and this package's routes are no longer the same lines.
• 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 World Train Map. A link to https://worldtrainmap.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, which is the safe default, and will be made explicit per route in the next release.
• Code (the MCP server in mcp/): MIT.

Also available on

• Hugging Face: huggingface.co/datasets/Flightmussy/trainrouter-atlas, kept byte for byte in step with data/ here
• Kaggle: kaggle.com/datasets/flightmussy/world-train-routes, the two fact files only, because Kaggle allows a dataset one licence label and the geometry is part ODbL
• Zenodo (archived, DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21322030, the concept DOI, which always resolves to the latest published release (today, v1.1.0)

The Kaggle mirror is new, and it is worth saying why it did not exist before: every earlier version of this README, and the site's own dataset page, linked one at kaggle.com/datasets/albanius/.... That account name has never been ours, and the same wrong id was hard-coded into the mirror-sync workflow, so the link was dead from the day it was written and the automation could not have fixed it. Both are corrected.

Citing

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

Updating

The data is generated from the atlas source by an exporter that is currently blocked on purpose, pending the split-licence work described above. That block is why data/ has not moved since 23 July and why the last release is still v1.1.0. Once it is unblocked, new versions land here first, and publishing a GitHub release mints a fresh Zenodo DOI and pushes the mirrors via sync-mirrors.yml, whose jobs each skip themselves when their API token is not configured.

Also in this repo

• mcp/ — source of the World Train Map MCP server (live at https://worldtrainmap.com/mcp, listed in the Official MCP Registry as com.trainrouter/atlas), which serves the atlas as tools for Claude and other MCP clients. It is deployed from the site's own atlas rather than from data/, so it is well ahead of the files here, though it is redeployed on its own schedule and can sit a little behind the site itself. Its atlas_stats tool reports exactly what it is serving.