Route planning

You give the tool a list of stops and a train. The path over the rails, the distances, the timetable and the energy all follow from that.

Finding the path

The route between two consecutive stops comes from a self-hosted OpenRailRouting engine, a rail-aware fork of GraphHopper running on an OpenStreetMap extract of Europe. It returns the track path, its length, and the distance run in each country.

Gauge is respected. Standard, Iberian, Russian and Irish gauge each get their own routing profile, so a route cannot silently cross a break of gauge that a real train could not.

From a path to a timetable

Raw driving time from the routing engine assumes a train that cruises at constant speed and never stops. We thus make two corrections:

Stop dynamics. A real train brakes before a stop and accelerates after it. Braking uses a comfortable constant deceleration; acceleration follows the physics of the locomotive pulling the train's actual weight, so a heavier train loses more time at every stop. The routing engine models none of this, so we add it per stop.

Schedule buffer. No railway timetables to the theoretical minimum. Each country adds a percentage margin reflecting how congested and delay-prone its network is, calibrated against slack observed in real night train timetables.

Dwell time at each stop is then the larger of what the train needs and what the station needs. A long train at a short platform is constrained by the train; a busy station by the station.

The route figures

Under the timetable the builder shows four figures for the route on screen.

Distance is the length of the routed track path, stop to stop. The countries are the ones that path runs through, in order.

Average speed is that distance divided by the scheduled journey time, from the first departure to the last arrival. It therefore includes everything above — braking and acceleration at every stop, the timetable buffer, and the dwell times — and it is not a top speed. The train matters twice: its weight and traction set the time lost at each stop, and its top speed caps every stretch of the path. High-speed lines are used only where both the train and the country's rules allow it. The same route with a different train can therefore show a different average, and occasionally a different path.

Stops counts every call, including the first and the last.

The night and its stops

A night train is timetabled around the night rather than from a departure time. The automatic timetable places the whole trip symmetrically around 02:30 and runs the return as its mirror image, so both directions spend the same share of the journey at night.

The night is 00:00–05:00, and every stop falls into one of three kinds:

• Boarding stop — the train leaves it before midnight.
• Alighting stop — the train reaches it at 05:00 or later.
• Night stop — anything in between. Passengers are asleep, so a night stop sells no tickets: demand is counted only from boarding stops to alighting stops.

On a long route the automatic placement can put the night somewhere inconvenient — over a strong evening catchment, say. The expert timetable lets you fix the night between two stops of your choice instead. The timetable then centres 00:00–05:00 on that section: its first stop must be left by 23:59 and its last reached at 05:00 or later. If the section is naturally shorter than five hours, it is stretched to fit by adding minutes to its legs in proportion to their running time.

Expert timetable

The automatic timetable is a sound default and needs no input. Expert mode, available once a route has been calculated, lets you shape it instead:

• First departure. Type the departure into the timetable. Pinned, it stays at that time when the route changes; following, it keeps its offset from the automatic time, so it moves with it.
• Minutes on single legs. Add running time where the model's is too optimistic, or to hold a train for a connection.
• The return. By default the return mirrors the outbound around 02:30, departure and added minutes included. It can instead carry its own times.
• The night. Fix the night between two stops, as described above.

Nothing changes until you recalculate, so several adjustments can be made first. Leaving expert mode drops the overrides, and the next calculation uses the automatic timetable again.

Suggested extra stops

The tool can propose additional stops that fit within a time budget. Each candidate is priced by what it costs the schedule: the detour to reach it, the braking and acceleration it forces, and the wait there. Candidates whose total exceeds the budget, or that would detour the route too far, are not offered.

Energy

Once the timetable exists, energy follows from it. The energy model takes the train's weight, length, distance and average speed per country leg and returns kilowatt-hours, which the electricity cost prices at each country's tariff.

What this does not do

The route is planned in isolation. It does not check whether a path is available at the time requested, whether the capacity exists, or whether an infrastructure manager would grant the slot.

Found a mistake?

This documentation describes a model that is still being built, and some of it will be wrong. If a number looks off, a source is missing, or an explanation does not hold up, tell us — it reaches the working group with the page you were reading.