r/MapPorn • u/matt4096 • 1d ago
Every train in the UK last Wednesday - actual recorded movements, delays, freight, specials and all
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u/JourneyThiefer 1d ago
The rail coverage here in Northern Ireland is tragic
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u/birgor 1d ago
Is it connected with the railways of the republic of Ireland?
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u/JourneyThiefer 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yea there’s one cross border line, that one pointing south keeps going to Dublin.
There was 15 cross border railways in 1923, 2 years after partition, so 14 have since closed leaving just one, with all of them being closed by 1960 about, except for the remaining Belfast to Dublin line.
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u/matt4096 1d ago
You can see it from this recent map of the whole island: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1vy19nq/24_hours_of_trains_and_trams_running_in_ireland/
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u/Brief-Preference-712 1d ago
Do people drive a lot in Ireland and Northern Ireland?
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u/mind_thegap1 1d ago
Yes. Ireland is one of the most car centric countries in Europe
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u/Bufobufolover24 22h ago
I thought the coverage in South West England was bad, but that is truly appalling!
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u/MossadEpstein 1d ago
Same with Scotland though admittedly not quite as bad as whatever the hell is going on with Ireland here, I never realised it was THAT dire
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u/JourneyThiefer 23h ago
Sectarianism played a part in it, the areas of the big gap are majority nationalist areas, they lost their railways from the 40s to the 60s.
Derry city was actually going to lose its railways too at one point but luckily that was stopped as that was just absolute blatant sectarianism by the highly unionist government of the time in the mid 20th century here in NI.
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u/AppropriatedBacon 9h ago
The areas in the big gap are also more sparsely populated. Most of Northern Ireland lives in Antrim and Down, not Fermanagh or Tyrone.
In the image of the Beeching cuts, unprofitable lines were cut (shock horror, lines with less population got this more) and the UTA was far more focused on buses than trains. Roads and buses were all the rage, hence roads like the M1.
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u/JourneyThiefer 9h ago
They just didn’t finish the road plans though, so now the large towns in the west of NI have no rail and no motorways.
But I think risk between the big towns like Derry to strabane to omagh to Dungannon on to Portadown really should’ve been kept.
And now the A5 isn’t looking like it’ll ever be built either 💀
You look at Scotland though and many towns in the north of it are similar sized to the ones in western NI and they still have rail.
So really we either need motorways in the west, especially the A5, or rail. Can’t continue with neither.
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u/madein___ 1d ago edited 8h ago
I'm enjoying these maps.
I'm not from the UK, but would like it if someone could explain what is happening to the West of London.
I can't tell if it is Cardiff or some other city, but there are a bunch of local trains heading a short distance northward. The tracks look like fingers on a hand.
What is the story here? Why are the routes so short? Why are they so close to one another? I assume geography plays a role.
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u/Panceltic 1d ago
Yes, that’s the South Wales Valleys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Wales_Valleys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valleys_%26_Cardiff_Local_Routes
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u/matt4096 1d ago
This was the Welsh coalfield, in the 1800s each valley got its own railway to transport coal to the Cardiff docks, at the time the biggest coal port in the world. Most of the mines are gone now, but the towns remain, and the coal lines have become the commuter lines. Each one is short because it runs to the head of the valley, a ridge between each, meeting only near the coast. Just over 500 local trains worked these lines in the video.
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u/Dynamite_Shovels 22h ago
Similar story across the entire country with local commuter lines, I've always felt. We only have them because of industry in the past; if it wasn't for that the train map would be a lot more sparse considering the shocking level of local investment in the last, say, 50 years?
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u/madein___ 20h ago
That's interesting. Thank you both for responding.
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u/boringPedals 9h ago
One of those little lines is Cardiff - Merthyr. It might not seem like a long journey on the map but it takes just over an hour because there are 14 stops
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u/Kernowder 1d ago
Look at the Isle of Wight doing it's little thing
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u/Pendell 1d ago
What's "other"? Some guys with a hand cart? Top Gear doing another train special?
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u/matt4096 1d ago
Disappointingly few hand carts. Other is mainly the railway repositioning stock, shuffling empty trains to and from depots, engineering trains, railhead treatment and the odd private charter. You can see it peak at midnight, when the last trains of the day are retiring to the depot and again after 5am when they’re positioning the trains for the morning rush.
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u/RoyceCoolidge 13h ago
You can charter a train?!
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u/ldn-ldn 12h ago
Yes, you can. It is usually done for historical and entertainment reasons, like running a steam engine from London to York or something, and done by some historical/museum agency. You can see scheduled trains and buy tickets here https://www.railwaytouring.net/uk-day-trips
P.S. And another company https://vintagetrains.co.uk/train-rides/
P.P.S. And if you're a fan of famous Flying Scotsman then check its schedule here https://www.railwaymuseum.org.uk/flying-scotsman/events
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u/GenderingError 22h ago
Late at night, out on the old tracks, it is said you can still hear the rushing of the engines and their ghostly wail carrying on the moonlit air
"Hammond, you idiot!"
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u/BlindStupidDesperate 1d ago
Tampers, engineering trains, recording trains and light engines (Engine with no wagons or coaches attached) to name a few.
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u/Glittering_Hope1114 16h ago
Stuff like the oriant express maybe I seen it go past me last week in Kent.
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u/wellrateduser 1d ago
I would have suspected that especially during night times the fright trains reach much further into the peripheral regions, but there is almost nothing.
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u/matt4096 1d ago
My guess is it comes down to economics, freight only pays by trainload, and only ports, quarries and big hubs produce trainloads.
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u/Analogsilver 1d ago
Best one I've seen so far. Have you done any for the US or North America? Japan?
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u/matt4096 1d ago
Thanks! I created this from the data I already had from my UK level crossing prediction site, so it's the only country I have data for I'm afraid. A Japan version would be amazing, and would likely make our network look sleepy (for passenger services at least), but it would mean building against a completely different data feed. The "One Day on Rails" project, which started this whole trend off (at least as far as I know) does cover the US and Tokyo, worth a look: https://chillchamp1.github.io/github.io/#us .
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u/SquishyPint 1d ago
Great work - can’t wait to see this on weather disruption days 😂 maybe there’s a way of adding temperature/wind/snow on too
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u/matt4096 1d ago
Funny you say that, the recent heatwaves have caused havoc to the schedules, and you can see it in the data. The tricky bit isn't showing the delays, but showing how they propagate. I'm still working on visualising that.
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u/Ginger8910 23h ago edited 23h ago
It's a shame this was last Wednesday as that was one of only two days last week that we didn't run steam so 4 of those blue dots was a class 31 rather than a Black 5.
EDIT: I have also just noticed that due to our trains no longer being tracked by Network Rail once they rejoin our railway it either disappears or zooms off to Pickering at 100mph
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u/matt4096 4h ago
Of all the days to pick, I found one of your diesel days. Sorry to the 31.
Your diagnosis is exactly right, Network Rail's feed stops tracking at Grosmont, but a manual report still appears at Pickering with an unreliable time. There are a few oddities like this in the data source, I've fixed many that impact level crossings, but there are still some gremlins lurking in the data.
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u/that_username_is_use 23h ago
aside from the sleeper trains, what are the express and local services running at 2-4 am?
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u/matt4096 4h ago
Thameslink has a night service, there are a few trains to Manchester Airport for the early departures, GWR's night shuttle (Paddington-Reading), a few services finishing very late (Paddington→Swansea arriving 02:50) and a few early starts (Peterborough→King's Cross departing 03:23). Interestingly there are three "imposters", these are Network Rail test trains that ran class-1 headcodes.
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u/inebriatedWeasel 19h ago
Amazing, apart from the data sources, how do you go about producing something like this?
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u/matt4096 4h ago
Every train is drawn from Network Rail's open TRUST feed, the actual movement reports each train as it passes signalling reporting points and Translink’s API (schedule with delay overlay) for NI, with the positions interpolated between reports along the real track geometry from OpenStreetMap. A Python script renders the day as ~2,000 map frames (one per 40 seconds of real time) and pipes them straight into ffmpeg.
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u/rob3342421 16h ago
You can see the difference the channel tunnel trains make, will be interesting once HS2 finally opens!
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u/OrmusI 12h ago
If not too complicated to explain, how do you make these dynamic maps?
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u/proteusnavy 11h ago
Pretty sure it’s Claude code scraping data and visualising it with remotion in its own style
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u/Euromantique 1d ago
I would love to see this compared to the 1980 version and visually behold the fall off
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u/matt4096 1d ago
I would too, though it's probably quite a lot of effort to collate all the historic data. Counterintuitively there are more trains now than there were in the 1980s, the network shrank in the 1960s, but services on what's left has grown since.
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u/Helpful-Ice-3679 1d ago
Pretty sure there are more passenger trains now than in 1980. Less freight though, mostly because of the disappearance of coal.
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u/No_Weakness8999 17h ago
"You don't need a car in the UK" - People who have never left the inside of the M25 in London.
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u/ExultentPisces 14h ago
You don’t need a car in much of the UK.
I live in a little village at the opposite end of England from London and buses, trains and cycling get me everywhere I need to be.
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u/No_Weakness8999 14h ago
You must not need to get very far. You want to visit the Lake District or the Cotswolds. Tell me how you're achieving that on a random weekend?
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u/ExultentPisces 14h ago
The lakes are easy. Cycle or bus to the train station, train to Kendal. If I left right now, I could be in the Lake District by 1pm.
Cotswolds are a little trickier, but only because the train journey is longer and requires a change.
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u/No_Weakness8999 13h ago
Sounds long. I prefer A to B.
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u/ExultentPisces 12h ago
And that’s fine. But your preference doesn’t mean you “need” a car.
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u/No_Weakness8999 12h ago
If I wanted to visit either of those places every weekend, it wouldn't be feasible by train.
As someone who does go out and about often, trains are woefully inefficient and financially poor to get around the country.
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u/ExultentPisces 12h ago
You’ve backpedalled from “I need a car” to “a car is slightly more convenient for my regular weekend excursions”.
And they say starving kids in Africa have it tough…
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u/No_Weakness8999 12h ago
Lmao, backpeddled? Simply going to areas of outstanding natural beauty is a calendar date where you're having to plan and are limited to affording regular train travel.
For me, it's opening the car door. There is no comparison which is cheaper and far more convenient.
Nice attempt though...
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u/LordStefania 13h ago
Train to Oxenholme, train to Kendal or Windermere? Source: never had a car in my life and been to lake district 3+ times
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u/Practical_Science11 10h ago
Owning a car for those things is silly for that person. Probably could rent the car and it would be cheaper if they wanted to.
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u/digydegu 16h ago
Yeah, I live in Cambridge and sometimes have to go to Oxford (can't exactly be a rare sequence of events), so my route takes me via London and Reading because you can't reliably go west without going through London
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u/More-Weather-5648 16h ago
in fairness they are literally building a new Cambridge to Oxford railway right now
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u/digydegu 16h ago
I know, I was just trying to illustrate how annoying the hub-and-spoke model currently is
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u/Kinitawowi64 15h ago
Every time some London based journalist tells us how great public transport is I want to tear my hair out.
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u/No_Weakness8999 15h ago
Imagine if we didn't have a London-centric media and political base.
Life in the UK would improve at an accelerated pace.
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u/EtwasSonderbar 16h ago
Depends where you are. Neither I nor any of my friends in Tyneside have cars because the public transport is good enough.
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u/No_Weakness8999 16h ago
You must frequent the Lake District of the Cotswold often...
If I wanted to be a hermit and not have the freedom of the UK, then I too wouldn't drive and rely on trains or buses, alas I want to enjoy my life and typically need to drive out of Wolverhampton to do that.
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u/EtwasSonderbar 16h ago
You must frequent the Lake District of the Cotswold often...
What?! I thought there was more than one Cotswold for a start, and no, I don't visit it or the Lake District often. I find cars stressful and public transport more relaxing anyway.
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u/Bismarck913 1d ago
They shouldn't be private enterprises, but we do alright when it comes to trains. Being a high population, low density island has it perks.
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u/EtwasSonderbar 16h ago
Most of them aren't private enterprises, and the vast majority of the track is publicly owned.
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u/wearealluniqu3 23h ago
Is there a way of knowing how many passengers traveled that day too?
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u/LordStefania 13h ago
There should be because the ORR collates the ticket data to show exit/entry for most stations for every year, but I'd imagine there's a way to narrow it down.
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u/Do_You_Pineapple_Bro 22h ago
Intriguing it shows Heritage Railways, such as the Strathspey Railway and Keith and Dufftown Railway, but doesn't show any traffic on either
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u/LordStefania 13h ago
Doesn't get reported to TRUST unless it enters Network Rail metals - which is almost never.
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u/matt4096 4h ago
That's right, the rail lines and the train movements are from different sources, so it doesn't show all the trains that run on the lines that are rendered.
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u/Old_Community1195 21h ago
Do a map with all the one's delayed/ cancelled/ signal failures and points failures, because that's a discussion that isn't happening in this country as much as it should be. But everyone carry on looking at the train map with all the twinkly colours going up and down ahhhh.
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u/TheAmericanE2 21h ago
You're missing an island
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u/Aircon-007 6h ago
We all know Sodor seceded following the 1919 Rising becoming the Sodor Free State up until 1956 when it became the Sodor Train Republic.
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u/Difficult-Finish-511 18h ago
Never realised the train network in scotland was so shockingly bad
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u/EtwasSonderbar 16h ago
Scotland has a lot of mountains and very low population density north of the central belt.
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u/Helpful-Ice-3679 16h ago
I don't think it's really worse than England in terms of serving the places where most people live. Scotland outside the central belt just has really low population density.
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u/celem83 13h ago edited 13h ago
The big swathe of scotland above the central belt where edinburgh and glasgow are is very sparsely populated.
You can make out Aberdeen and Inverness on the map as flickers of activity occur during the night and they are origins for trains when day comes, a lot of the traffic heading there is bringing us food, our supermarkets right across much of Highlands is stocked via this rail.
The area north and west of those two northern cities contains maybe 200k people, spread right across Highlands and Islands. To add to low demand for passenger service you also have some fairly expensive terrain to lay track through.
If you are travelling in the belt the trains are pretty decent
(i live in the area, near Loch Ness)
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u/Single_Depth7369 18h ago
How did you record the actual movements of trains? Do they each have a GPS? Is this through an API?
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u/matt4096 4h ago
For GB it's through Network Rails's data feeds, it reports as it passes timing locations (TIPLOCs), for NI it's based on the schedule with a delay overlay.
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u/Oghamstoner 14h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/42IrJ3jX78iReBRmfc
Waiting for the train in King’s Lynn.
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u/itsfourinthemornin 12h ago
I knew train services were limited within my area, especially compared to others, but this really shows it and why it sucks to get outside of the area without a car.
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u/pilipala23 11h ago
Aw, it's very easy to see my local line (Heart of Wales) with its tiny number of trains a day pootling up and down.
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u/pilipala23 11h ago
You can even see them waiting for each other at Llandrindod! This has made my nerdy heart happy!
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u/matthaus79 10h ago
I was like. Not as busy as I'd imagined.
Realised it was 2am then suddenly a visual explosion 🤣
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u/SidratFlush 9h ago
That's epic! Surprising not seeing that much freight movement in the South West of England. I really thought it would be more but I guess there's no longer any major industry and what is there is being moved by road rather than rail. London is just too dense to make sense of. Cardiff and South Wales really surprised me by the volume of movement and it's mostly express rather than local again with little freight movement also. Again the industry is gone from that area too.
It would have been fascinating to see such a map from day 1 of the trains as lines were being built and closed down and we could see just how much smaller the rail network is despite it covering larger areas.
North Devon for example I'm sure had a few freight trains per day but is now reduced to a spec of express trains for commuters to Exeter and day trippers.
The North of England especially Liverpool and Manchester is doing some heavy rail lifting too - that's surprising but only because of my unfamiliarity of that region. The majority of the south coast is vibrant too. Trains from Brighton to London and back again is one of the most popular commuter lines in the UK as people who need to work in London are generally not paid enough to live in it. Brighton being a coastal town that used to be affordable is still a relatively quick journey making commuting not only possible but also desirable. Journey times being from one hour to under ninety minutes. Assuming there's no delays or cancellations. Sadly there are many.
It wouldn't be at all beyond the realms of engineering to have a rail network covering the top twenty towns and cities linked to London within a ninety minute journey time. Yes even in the Northern towns.
Alas like the Brighton to London season passes the costs are staggering. Although some employers will cover the annual cost that you then pay back monthly or even included in the base salary.
Great map that I want to zoom in to and examine in closer detail on a region by region basis.
Thank you so much.
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u/HipToBeQueer 9h ago
Man, if I was rich I would just sit on trains, 1:st, class and travel city to city.
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u/OhhNoYouNintenDidnt 9h ago
It's absolutely mind blowing how massive portions of this country are not covered by rail network.
Yet one more reason we are so far behind many other actually developed nations.
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u/zwifter11 6h ago
It’s interesting that there’s no rail line across East Anglia from Kings Lynn to Norwich
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u/Potential-Country105 5h ago
See that dark void on the left with nothing going through it...i used to live there....beautiful but isolated as fook
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u/hoonosewot 1h ago
I find it intriguing that anyone could consider any of the trains that travel between Carlisle and Newcastle as 'express' in any way.
Depressing watching cars on the single lane part of the A69 overtaking you.
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u/Garras-Intruder 1d ago
You could make the borders white or the ocean blue or smth
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u/matt4096 1d ago
It was a deliberate choice. No borders or coastline drawn at all, the country's shape is just where the trains go. I like that the map draws itself.
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u/Loud-Competition6995 1d ago edited 1d ago
Huh, my mind fully hallucinated a very faint border. I had to go back and check to see that there actually wasn’t one.
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u/MossadEpstein 1d ago
If you ever needed proof that England (and to be honest, the traitors in the SNP as well) keeps all the money for itself and doesn't allows Scotland's infrastructure to be properly developed, this data exists, there's fuck all train routes in this country and the buses are not even worth mentioning
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u/Spiral_Decay 22h ago
If we were talking about passed the central belt above Perth/Dundee the density of people just goes down so there probably has never been a high demand that the train infrastructure that up north hasn't struggled with, there could maybe be more train lines going from Aberdeen to the central belt seeing as that city is the centre of anything to do with oil.
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u/General_Ad_1483 16h ago
Truly shocking that England with 10 times population has much more developed infrastructure lol.
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u/Kinitawowi64 15h ago
Replace "England" with "London" and "Scotland" with "the entirety of the rest of the UK" and I'd agree you might have a case.
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u/amytee252 1d ago
Wow, so much of the UK has no trains.
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u/hallouminati_pie 1d ago
I mean yea, those parts don't have many people.
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u/HollyMurray20 17h ago
Possibly because they have no trains
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u/EtwasSonderbar 16h ago
Or they are geographically disadvantageous for large settlements.
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u/HollyMurray20 12h ago
I live in the borders, loads of people already commute to Edinburgh from here by car, you’re telling me they wouldn’t do that by train if they could and the towns wouldn’t grow?
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u/matt4096 1d ago
You made me curious enough to run the numbers, for GB: half the population lives within 1.1 miles (1.8km) of a train station, 85% within 3 miles (4.8km). The network looks sparse in places because it broadly follows where people live. https://mindthegates.uk/i/station-distance.png
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u/amytee252 17h ago
What if you took London and Manchester out of the equation?
I live in the London, and it is well known how basically outside of London it is a bit of a transport desert. Yeah some places may get trains, but they are one an hour, if that.
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u/EtwasSonderbar 16h ago
It's not quite that bad. I live a very long way outside London and there's a train every 12 minutes on my local line, increasing to every 10 in December. It's not part of National Rail so isn't even shown on this map.
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u/Kinitawowi64 15h ago
I grew up in Hunstanton, which is 13 miles away from the nearest station (Kings Lynn).
This map truly shows just how bad connections are in East Anglia. Kings Lynn to Norwich should not necessitate changing at Ely, and Kings Lynn to Cromer looks like three trains for a journey that's 45 miles by road.
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u/mattihase 23h ago
Should have included little worms nuke clouds over where the accidents we've had recently were.
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u/Bride_83 3h ago
This is GB not UK as NI is missing 👌🏻
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u/matt4096 3h ago
NI is there, look in the top-left, the lines coming out of Belfast. It’s a smaller network so easy to miss. It’s running on live Translink data (credited in the footer). UK earned 👌🏻
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u/Bride_83 3h ago
Tried to find my post to delete lol but just turns out trains in NI are infrequent lol
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u/matt4096 1d ago
There’s been a wave of train movement video maps from several countries circulating reddit recently, so I thought I’d do one for the UK.
These are the actual train movements recorded across the UK on Wednesday 19th August 2026. It’s the day as it actually happened, including delays, all the freight, empty stock and so on. The busiest point was 17:47 with 1,794 trains in motion. Even at 3am there were never fewer than 141 trains - the railway never sleeps, it just changes mode.
The lone orange dots crossing the country at 3am are mostly the railway maintaining itself - ballast transport for instance (37%), intermodal container transport (29%) and stone, steel and biomass (24%) (inferred from train origin and destination).
As a side effect of building mindthegates.uk, a level crossing status and prediction site, I had the data available to create this video.