Mapping 219,469 Rail Journeys

One Day on Rails maps more than 70,000 train journeys across Europe during one single day this summer. It also maps 5,737 journeys across the USA, 34,206 journeys in Tokyo and 11,075 journeys in London.

One Day On Rails visualizes an entire day's railway activity on one single animated interactive map. Rather than showing trains at a single point in time, One Day on Rails uses real timetable data to animate thousands of services moving along their actual routes.

The main European visualization combines railway data from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and France. In total, it maps 70,427 scheduled journeys, with cross-border services carefully deduplicated so that the same train isn't counted twice when it appears in different national datasets.

There are also separate visualizations for Germany, Benelux, Switzerland, France and Berlin, as well as the USA, Tokyo, New York and London. The individual visualizations together account for 219,469 mapped train journeys.

One Day on Rails turns what would normally be an enormous and rather dry collection of timetable data into something surprisingly hypnotic: a whole day's worth of railway journeys brought to life on a map.

Inspired by One Day on Rails, Clock-face Schedule maps a single day across the Swiss rail network. What makes Clock-face Schedule so fascinating to watch is how this map feels less like chaotic traffic and more like a carefully calibrated timepiece.

This is because of the Swiss clock-face schedule.

Every half hour, you can watch trains converge simultaneously on major hubs across the country, pause as connections are made, and then radiate back out along regional lines. Rather than scheduling each railway line independently, Switzerland coordinates its network around major interchange stations such as Zurich, Bern and Basel. Trains from different directions arrive at these hubs shortly before the hour or half-hour, allowing passengers to make connections, before departing again a few minutes later.

The result is a remarkable choreography of trains: across the entire country, the railway network moves to the rhythm of the clock. The clock at the heart of the visualization is itself inspired by the iconic Swiss railway clock, designed by Hans Hilfiker in 1944. One of the clock's most distinctive features is its red second hand, which pauses briefly at 12 before jumping forward to mark the next minute. The reason for this is that in the 1940s, it was impossible to electronically synchronize individual clock motors across hundreds of stations.

To solve this, Hilfiker designed the second hand to run slightly fast - completing a rotation in 58 seconds - and then pause at the top of the hour. At precisely 60 seconds, an electrical impulse sent from a central master clock triggered the second hand to jump forward and start the next minute. This brief pause ensured that every railway clock throughout Switzerland struck the start of each new minute in absolute, perfect unison.