Railway lets you look up travel information for many different railways without needing to navigate through different websites.
Railway is free and open source software.
Installation
We evaluated Railway using Manjaro, an Arch-based distro, as well as Ubuntu.
With Manjaro, Pamac (Manjaro’s front-end installation tool) lets us install Railway either from a package in the Arch User Repository or from a Flatpak. We chose the latter.
Flatpak is an open source containerized package format similar to Snap. While Snap relies on a central repository for software, Flatpak can be installed from different sources. The primary source is Flathub.
In Operation
With Railway you can search for journey information. In the example below, we’ve searched for train information for a trip from Exeter St. Davids to Aberdeen. The application provides details include departure, arrivals, and platform information. For some searches, if there are delays, this is also brought to your attention.
The app lets you bookmark current and future trips as well as frequent searches.
There are also some advanced options such as filtering the method of transport.
Summary
Railway has a simple and attractive user interface with a good range of functionality. We like its modern adaptive interface.
Railway is an ambitious app given that it covers networks from all over the globe, but with most coverage from Europe. It does need to add many more European networks though. For example, it doesn’t include the London TFL network. And it suffers from the data provided by the networks. For example, information is limited from Transitous, a community-run provider-neutral international public transport routing service.
Some railway companies provide some useful information that’s currently missing from Railway such as seat availability. And of course they let you purchase the tickets, functionality that Railway doesn’t offer.
for the vast majority of searches, there’s important information missing such as the cost of the ticket.
Website: mobile.schmidhuberj.de/railway
Support: GitLab Code Repository
Developer: Julian Schmidhuber
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Railway is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials