Realtime Trains is brilliant for UK rail, but the moment you cross the Channel there’s nothing like it. European rail apps are either booking portals trying to sell you a ticket, or national tools that stop at the border. As someone who travels frequently by train across Europe – and follows the network as a hobby – this was super annoying.
Co-built with AI, OpenTrack pulls live timetable and realtime data from Transitous, an open-source routing engine fed by GTFS and GTFS-RT feeds from operators across the continent, and presents it in a clean, information-first interface. You can pull up departures or arrivals at any European rail station, drill into a specific service to see the full calling pattern with live delay and cancellation states stop-by-stop, or plan a journey point-to-point with interchange detail. It handles the messiness of international services – timezone boundaries, part-cancellations, cross-border operator data – and tries to surface that clearly.
The whole thing runs as a single HTML file with no backend, as it should be fast, portable, and require nothing to deploy. It’s in active development and still in beta, but already covers rail across the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and more.