Today we’re quietly (and finally!) opening up Railfinder to the public! This is our beta version and - hopefully - the first step towards that one booking site for trains across Europe that we all dream of.
Lots of work has gone into this and equally lots still to do before reach that vision, but if you’d like to try what we’ve built you can now just go to https://www.railfinder.eu and have a go!
Any and all feedback more than welcome 🙏
And for the nerds among us, we have a page on all the details that went into this - including our initial ticket coverage & how the search works: https://www.railfinder.eu/how-it-works
Ask me anything!
@stefanlindbohm what data structures, path finding algorithms, infrastructure and tooling are you using etc 🤓
also, how big is your team?
@bovine3dom Data is in Postgres. Journey planner is a custom-built one in Go based on RAPTOR and follow-up paper from KIT. Hosting on Render and Hetzner. Web app in Ruby on Rails.
Tech team is ..mostly me 😅. We’ve had some added oomph from a consultancy when money allows.
I have two co-founders, Zuzana who’s a marketing strategist and Veronica who is managing our partner relations. Some project-based consultants when possible/needed on a few non-tech things.
@stefanlindbohm cool, thanks for the response! is it vanilla postgres or are you using postgis / column database extensions?
is "partner relations" a euphemism for "i really didn't want to talk to the SNCF myself" :) ?
do you modify RAPTOR to find "better" routes e.g. with night trains or do you use it mostly unaltered and score the routes afterwards?
(much love for Hetzner)
@bovine3dom Postgis (used mostly at import time for now) and the official hstore extension for localised names of things. That’s all.
Haha! She’s working on a massive pipeline of new contracts we will be able to add so I couldn’t do her job whether I wanted to talk to SNCF or not :)
Our RAPTOR implementation is pretty far from the variant in the paper. The authors would potentially call us crazy for some of the shenanigans we’re doing 😅😅
Stefan Lindbohm
Oliver Blanthorn