EARTH · RAILWAYS
The World’s Railways on the Living Globe
Switch this layer on and the dark land lights up with steel lines— the world’s mainline railways, from the Trans-Siberianstretching nine thousand kilometres across Russia to the American transcontinentals, India’s dense web, and Europe’s tangle of high-speed corridors. It is the land twin of the undersea cables: cables are the lines under the sea, rail is the lines across the land. This layer draws the tracks, not the trains — a sourced, dated snapshot of where the network runs.
The network in numbers
Track kilometres, not route kilometres — where a line is double-tracked, each parallel track is mapped and counted, which is how OpenStreetMap surveys rail.
Individual surveyed track segments, merged into continuous lines for the globe so the network draws as the corridors it really is.
Baked once from OpenStreetMap and dated — railways change over years, not minutes, so this is a snapshot, never dressed up as a live feed.
What counts — and what doesn’t
This layer shows lines that OpenStreetMap’s surveyors have tagged as mainline heavy rail — the trunk routes that carry a country’s through traffic. That deliberately leaves things out: branch lines, freight yards, sidings, metros, trams and light rail are not drawn, so a city that clearly has trains can still look sparse here if its network is mostly urban transit. Coverage follows the mapping community — excellent across North America, Europe, India, Japan and China, thinner where fewer mappers work. The geometry is simplified for the globe view: at country zoom it is faithful; zoom to a single junction and you are past what this layer is for.
The freight-corridor story
Rail is one thread of the world’s heavy infrastructure. Follow the cargo: it moves by rail to a port, crosses the sea past the cables, and feeds the mega-cities — all of it drawing on the same grid.
The internet on the seafloor — toggle both and the planet’s wired skeleton appears, land and sea.
GRID · THE POWER TWINThe transmission gridHigh-voltage lines — the other network of long steel-and-wire corridors crossing the land.
ATLAS · WHERE RAIL MEETS SEAThe world’s seaportsThe interchange points — where the corridors on this map hand their cargo to the ships.
ATLAS · WHERE THE LINES LEADMega-citiesEvery dense knot in this network is a city — the places the railways were built to join.
About this data
The railways come from OpenStreetMap — the openly-licensed world map built by millions of volunteer surveyors, and the most complete open record of the world’s rail network that exists. The data is published under the Open Database License (ODbL): © OpenStreetMap contributors. We pulled every way tagged as mainline heavy rail once, merged the segments into continuous lines, simplified them for the globe, and froze the result as a dated snapshot — the live site never queries OpenStreetMap’s servers. No live badge, on purpose:this layer shows where the tracks run, not where any train is right now. Real-time train positions have no worldwide open feed the way aircraft and ships do — where operators publish them at all, it is patchwork — so we draw the network honestly and leave the trains out rather than pretend.