Japanese Train Movement Visualized on a Single Map

Here’s a fun website that was making the rounds on Twitter yesterday. Testudonow is a site that visually maps all of the trains running in Japan.

As I understand it, the visualization depends on the fixed schedules of trains around the country, so it is not quite a reflection of ‘real time location.’ But most of the time, if the trains are on time – and they usually are [1] – then this should be a pretty good representation of where trains are in cities around the country.

I’m not entirely sure who created this, but it’s thoroughly badass. There is a button at the top that allow you to view scheduled train movement at different hours of the day, although the default view is set to the current time. Another button allows you to switch to other cities, and view how the trains would run in cities in Japan, other than the default view of Tokyo.

This is a really fun hacking project, and it really goes to show the benefits of publicly sharing data like train schedules so that mad scientist developers can build interesting things of top of it.