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Offline-first UK train planner

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Hey HN! I'd like to share my personal experiment with a different way of finding train journeys across the UK.When I book flights, I use sites like Kiwi and Skyscanner for flexible searches - multiple airports, 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.

HN · launched Mar 24, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 0 views

Niche: trip and travel planning apps · 335 launches, 45 in the last 7 days ▲ +15% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Travel & hospitality
  • Search & retrieval
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial Creating a route planner UI is easy, but running multi-criteria journey planning (RAPTOR/CSA) offline on consumer hardware with the entire UK rail network timetable is an algorithmic hurdle.

What it would actually take: The application requires compiling National Rail timetables (Darwin/CIF feeds) into highly compressed binary formats (e.g., SQLite, FlatBuffers, or indexed arrays) packaged for client-side execution via WASM or native local storage. The routing engine must execute Round-Based Public Transit Routing (RAPTOR) or Connection Scan Algorithm (CSA) directly in the browser with minimal memory overhead and instant sub-second response times. Implementing this requires deep algorithmic knowledge of graph/transit search algorithms and binary data compression.

Discussion

2 comments analyzed.

Concerns raised: High cost of international rail data APIs, Complexity of different country data formats

Feature requests: Support more countries, Support all of Europe

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 264 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #255 of 265 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 111 days after the earliest competitor.

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