Trains and Termini

tokyo-trains

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a city in possession of a good railway network, must be in want of an animated train map. Yet, having once beheld the grandeur of Mini Tokyo 3D and the intricate labyrinth of the Shinjuku Station Indoor, one might reasonably despair of any further elegance in the art.

Mr. Gregg Tavares, however, was of a different mind entirely. Reader, he married them.

Gregg's creation, tokyo-trains, is a stunning web-based 3D visualization that fuses the macro city scale of Mini Tokyo 3D with the micro depth of the underground station architecture shown in the Shinjuku Station Indoor Map. While Mini Tokyo 3D gives us sweeping real-time vehicular movement across the capital, and the Shinjuku Station Indoor Map reveals the multi-layered underground maze of Japan’s busiest hub, tokyo-trains brings both concepts into a single interactive city-wide interactive map.

This map renders trains gliding along the tracks of 147 different train lines, while physically diving down into multi-level station complexes. Heights across the scene are rendered true to scale, utilizing OpenStreetMap data to map levels and platform placements. When you fly the camera into major interchanges like Shinjuku, Shibuya, or Tokyo Station, you can watch the trains plunge beneath the surface layers directly to their designated subterranean platforms.

The result is an impressive marriage of scale and detail. It is part transit map, part architectural model and part miniature world - and should delight anyone who has ever been fascinated by trains or dreamt of playing with a city-scale model railway.