When I attempt the Longest journey in the EU, I want to keep people online informed where I am and how the trip is progressing, and do this automatically if I can.
There is a sort of racing element to all of this: where I should be, and whether I am on schedule or behind schedule. Ideally I have some sort of map, a kind of “Where’s Jon?” that has all of this information on it.
What do I have for this?
– .geojson files of the routes of all 18 trains I will take during the trip (these are here in Nextcloud)
– timetables for all the trains, including times at the 123 stations (and getting geocoordinates for these stations is easy – I just have not literally done it yet!)
– an iPhone with me on the trip, that has GPS and a data connection
It would ideally look something like this:
So far I have used uMap to display static data – you can see all the routes of the Longest Journey (and the rest of my trips this autumn) on uMap here. Adding station locations and times to that would not be hard. But I can see no way to get a live location onto uMap.
I could approach the problem the other way – Google Maps and Apple Maps, and some messengers like Signal, have location sharing options. But the problem here is I can find no way to display this location on a custom map that also shows the railway data. I can get make a custom map in My Maps in Google Maps for example, but I cannot see how to share my location on that map with others. I would also prefer an open source solution if possible.
There are some travel apps I have considered – Polarsteps has a tracker, but no railway mapping data. Viaduct has all the rail mapping data, but no live tracking. Bike race trackers like Livio likewise do not seem to have much in the way of customising the map onto which the live data is overlaid.
So is there some way to cobble something together that does all of this? If you think you know a way, do leave a comment below or contact me!
After a lot of messing around I have a system that works well enough. It looks like this:
This uses Thunderforest tiles based on OpenStreetMap data, with OpenRailwayMap lines overlaid on top (optional). PhoneTrack for Nextcloud pulls it all together (thanks Kobold for the tip!) and Overland for iOS provides the location data. I have not yet found the right way to display the custom geojson files for each train on this as well, but I am working on this. But even in its current form this system works well enough for what I need.
