Design a style for railways using OpenStreetMap data.
Most maps favour only roads. We want to display railway information as a base map.
Too many railway services use a general purpose OpenStreetMap base layer (or even worse, a proprietary map from a GAFAM company) and this project aims to change that.
As the OpenRailwayMap project shows, OpenStreetMap has a lot of information that can be used to design a nice looking general purpose railway base map.
In this project we provide:
- a style that focuses on showing railway infrastructure,
- a script that extracts the needed railway data from OpenStreetMap (with certain specific tags) and generates a PMTiles,
- a demonstration webpage to explore the style.
This project has been initiated during the Hack4Rail 2025, a joint hackathon organized by the railway companies SBB, ÖBB, and DB in partnership with the OpenRail Association.
Three teams tackled the challenge under different angles (focus on a specific zoom level, different use cases…). Their results can be found here:
Maps on the web are nowadays generally rendered on the browser with a library such as MapLibre.
The data is pre-processed into Vector Tiles to only access to the needed data at a given coordinate and zoom level (when displaying Europe, we don’t need the position of every three).
Similarly, only some tags from OpenStreetMap are used. There are conventions such as OpenMapTiles that define what tags are included.
However, for this project, the usual data schemes doesn’t have enough details for railway specific rendering and we
For this preprocessing, we use the tool planetiler. The file ProcessRailway.java contains all the specific configuration.
Read the justfile to see how to run the processing different steps.
The project focuses on the physical representation of rail networks. However, travelers often need information about commercial lines. The publication of Patrick Brosi and Hannah Bast could be considered to transform the physical layer to have more information.
The content of this repository is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.