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marcusdev

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Show HN: Offline-first UK train planner

railraptor.com
6 points·by marcusdev·4 mesi fa·2 comments

Show HN: An endless scrolling word search game

endless-wordsearch.com
25 points·by marcusdev·7 mesi fa·16 comments

comments

marcusdev
·3 mesi fa·discuss
Thanks for the feedback. I was missing the "Fixed Links" data, which covers any transfers that aren't part of the normal rail network (e.g. walking/bus/tube). I've just added that, so the tube routes via London should work for you now.

The routeing data is pretty complex - there are layers on layers of data files and rules to cover all the edge cases and weird stations/routes. It's been really fun to dig into it.

I'll look into adding more possible connections to see if it can find the Penzance route - I'd be curious to know if anyone has ever actually completed the 27 hour journey!
marcusdev
·3 mesi fa·discuss
My thoughts exactly! Sometimes I don't mind travelling a little longer, or ending up at a nearby station, if it's a nicer journey.

Thank you for the feedback, pricing is definitely next on my to do list if I can make it work.
marcusdev
·3 mesi fa·discuss
I do love Disjkstra :) this actually uses a modified version of the "Raptor" algorithm for public transport routing (hence the name!): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
marcusdev
·3 mesi fa·discuss
https://raileasy.co.uk / https://trainsplit.com is the most flexible existing service I've found, but even that doesn't give you an "anywhere" option.

I'm looking at how to add price data to railraptor, but it might mean sacrificing the fully-offline capability... once I have prices it should absolutely be possible to build a filter along the lines of "find me the cheapest popular destinations that are at least 50 miles away".
marcusdev
·3 mesi fa·discuss
I'm working on a fully offline, client-side train journey planner for UK rail - https://railraptor.com

When booking flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner that let you do flexible searches - multiple destinations, custom connections, creative routes, etc. But rail search feels oddly constrained. All the UK train operators offer basically the same experience, and surface the exact same routes. I always suspected there were better or just different options that weren’t being shown. Where is the "Skyscanner for trains"?

After digging through the national rail data feeds, I decided to have a go at building my own route planner that runs completely offline in the browser. This gave me the freedom to implement more complex filters, search to/from multiple stations, and do it without a persistent network connection.

Now I'm finding routes that aren't offered by the standard train operators, connecting at different stations, and finding it's often easier to travel to different stations (some I'd never heard of) that get me closer and faster to where I actually want to go!

It's still a little rough and I'd like to add more features such as fares, VSTP data, and direct-links to book tickets, but wanted to share early and get some initial feedback before investing more time into it. So, thanks in advance - let me know what you think.
marcusdev
·4 mesi fa·discuss
Thanks for the feedback!

I'd love to support more countries, but from what I can tell it's a mammoth task. Every country publishes rail data in different ways - there are aggregator APIs to join them up, but they don't come cheap.
marcusdev
·5 mesi fa·discuss
I've been working on a tool to solve a problem I keep seeing at my day job when handling large-scale deployments and migrations. The “plan” is always scattered across internal docs, spreadsheets, and Slack threads. Coordinating work across multiple teams becomes messy fast

So I'm building Taskplan (https://taskplan.run) - it's like Ansible, but for people. Build a plan, assign tasks to people or teams, and get a real-time dashboard to track progress as the work happens.

I'd love feedback from anyone who deals with the same issues or works on ops-heavy projects.
marcusdev
·7 mesi fa·discuss
Thanks for this! It was a tricky one to solve, but finding an "accidental" match now grants a point.
marcusdev
·7 mesi fa·discuss
Thanks for the feedback - fixed!
marcusdev
·7 mesi fa·discuss
Awesome, glad you like it! Thanks for the feedback. I've just bumped my Gemini API key limit, fingers crossed that fixes things for you.
marcusdev
·7 mesi fa·discuss
You must have been playing the "Wild Animals" category. A Kinkajou is a tropical rainforest mammal according to Wikipedia :)

The 5 built-in word lists that you can play without signing up were generated by Gemini 3 Pro - there are a few obscure ones in there!