decimalenough an hour ago

Here's a zoomable 3D model of the world's busiest train station, Shinjuku in Tokyo:

https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/

3.6 million passengers per day. Wikipedia:

The main East Japan Railway Company (JR East) station and the directly adjacent private railways have a total of 35 platforms, an underground arcade, above-ground arcade and numerous hallways with another 17 platforms (52 total) that can be accessed through hallways to five directly connected stations without surfacing outside. The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.

sschueller an hour ago

Wow, very nice project.

The ones in Zürich are not actually metro stations. They where built to be but then the city voted against a metro. The stations that were already built were converted into tram stations. There where some complications like that fact the the tram is almost too tall to fit. The photograph is almost fully compressed when the tram enters the tunnel.

The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.

[1] https://cdn.dreso.com/fileadmin/_processed_/0/3/csm_Tierspit...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramtunnel_Milchbuck%E2%80%93S... [DE]

  • rwmj an hour ago

    I'd love to know why you'd vote against having a metro.

    • joshvm 21 minutes ago

      Zurich does pretty well with light rail, trams and buses. Public transport is very good there. Two more reasons are that the city isn't that big, so you're in easy walking distance of some sort of connection, and the terrain isn't ideal. A good chunk of the population live up steep hills which are well-served by the tram system. The airport is also very well-connected by bus/tram/rail, and only 10-15 minutes to the centre.

      That said, I would have loved to see HBf on this website.

      • coderatlarge a minute ago

        i remember visiting zurich once and standing at a light rail station when the next train was one minute overdue and all the people waiting were looking at their watches in total disbelief and consternation. warms my sla-minded heart :)

    • scottgg 3 minutes ago

      The public transport coverage especially with tram in Zürich is already amazing

    • sschueller an hour ago

      Costs, existing infrastructure and alternatives (S-Bahn was extended) and fears that the local businesses above would loose foot traffic if people are no longer traveling above ground with the trams.

    • arccy an hour ago

      with sufficient density and priority on roads, a tram network might be better, other than having to wait outside in bad weather

  • izacus an hour ago

    Huh, I wondered why Tierspital station is so strange. TIL!

  • rsynnott 22 minutes ago

    > The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.

    ... Wait, what? That seems like a serious false economy...

walterlw an hour ago

Very impressive work. Was very saddened to see how Ukrainian Kyiv and Kharkiv stations were excluded. We have deep stations (like Arsenal'na at 105m that connects directly to the above-ground Dnipro station on a river bank), we have both Soviet-made and new stations. Also now they are doubly essential being used for both transportation and shelter during air raids by millions.

  • rjsw 15 minutes ago

    Why make it easier for an enemy to plan an attack on them.

bambax 2 hours ago

This is insane. Never saw anything like it.

One minor nitpick: zooming the map is very slow (maybe Leaflet is not the best choice?). And the main station in Paris is missing: Châtelet-Les Halles.

Other than that, incredible work!! Amazing.

  • diiiimaaaa an hour ago

    Leaflet should easily handle stuff like this if configured correctly. OP just slaps 3000 markers in a single layer, and each of them is an image element in dom. Should probably use some marker clustering for that.

  • benoitg 2 hours ago

    Châtelet is there, you have to click on the 3D icon to experience the full majesty of its unending corridors in 3D

    • tcumulus 2 hours ago

      There even is a section on Chatelet Les Halles if you scroll down. Insane station.

  • guilamu 2 hours ago

    Zooming working perfectly on my galaxy s23.

    Also, Châtelet les Halles is available just after 'Château d'eau".

rossant 12 minutes ago

This guy has spent the last 10 years drawing about 2,547 stations around the world and making 3D models available to everyone. This might be the most amazing thing I have ever seen on the internet. Kudos.

jdranczewski 2 hours ago

A very cool project, and a great resource for people with reduced mobility - I semi-regularly use Transport for London's station drawings (linked on this website) over the official accessibility map, which doesn't differentiate between stairs and escalators for example.

jddj an hour ago

Very impressive work.

I also learned something, which I'd always wondered cynically but never thought to investigate. The walking connection between lines at some stations in Barcelona seems so long as to not make sense, but it's explained here that at the time the different lines and stations were dug and extended independently by different companies.

> Among the reasons for having such long corridors [in Barcelona] is the lack of planning or the vision of the metro network as a bunch of individual lines. As an example: line 1 and line 4 were extended to Urquinaona in 1932, but both lines were not connected until 1972, as they were originally operated by different companies.

wiether 2 hours ago

Incredible work!

I first looked at _regular_ stations, but once I understood that it was done by a single guy, I had to look at Paris' Mordor: Châtelet.

The 3D view looks like an ants nest, as expected.

Very impressed by the work done!

  • prof-dr-ir an hour ago

    > Paris' Mordor: Châtelet.

    "Worst of all, the air was full of fumes; breathing was painful and difficult, and a dizziness came on them, so that they staggered and often fell. And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on."

undebuggable 2 hours ago

I was never able to build mental model of Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Most of the times was simply following the signs and yup, the layout is complicated.

alvaro_calleja an hour ago

OMG this is amazing! I've checked my station (Velázquez - Madrid) and it is 100% accurate. Also, the 3D stations are insane! ¡Enhorabona!

throw-qqqqq 2 hours ago

Holy shit! This is an incredible piece of work.

And they are almost all drawn “manually”! I am SO impressed by the dedication

> For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 2,547 stations

> A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station

> Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s

pjmlp 29 minutes ago

Very nice work, consider also eventually adding Athens and Thessaloniki stations.

Dansvidania an hour ago

Wow. How?

Incredibly impressive. Is there a public dataset that was used to build this?

  • decimalenough an hour ago

    The page footnote says that all sketches were hand drawn by the author over a 10 year period, and digitized during COVID by the power of extreme boredom.

    • ljsprague 30 minutes ago

      So they are not renders of 3D models?

coreyh14444 an hour ago

File this in the "autism (can be) a gift" bucket.

itsmevictor an hour ago

Very impressive project! Congrats.

ExpertAdvisor01 2 hours ago

Is there a reason why moscow is missing ?

  • paduc an hour ago

    Probably because he didn’t manage to visit.

  • ahoka an hour ago

    It says "European", not "Asian".

    • d1sxeyes an hour ago

      West of the Urals is Europe. Istanbul is included, and that’s even more questionably European than Moscow, I think.

      • a99c43f2d565504 41 minutes ago

        It's also not an exhaustive list anyway. At least Helsinki, Finland is missing. I think Finland is unambigiously Europe.

ant6n an hour ago

Love this project. Back in my transit blogging days, one of the themes was short and long transfers. And here this idea immediately starts surfacing just looking at the stations - the crazy mazes with long tunnels are cool to explore on paper, but suck for actual transfers. It adds slogs in the middle of the trips, and kind of discourages transit use because trips seem longer and more work.

When scrolling down, the author actually includes a long discussion on the best possible transfer layouts! Many of the terrible stations over time are of course historically grown, evolved over time, and weren't the result of some maniac evil genius deciding to create miserable transfers. Systems are built sometimes over a hundred years, so a later station is added mostly where it can fit, not a as a result of some master plan.

But there's also ways to deal with these issues, which can be found in Berlin.

1) for the recently opened "Unter den linden" station, which is a transfer between a new extension (u5) and a 100-year-old line (u6), a station on the old line was actually moved by 180m so that the transfer would be good. (That is, the old station was closed and a new station built a bit a distance away)

2) in general in Berlin, especially after WWII, a lot of the subway construction followed a very long term master plan (to the extend that West Berlin actually planned a network for all of Berlin, even though the East was in another country behind the iron curtain). When stations were built, the planners "knew" it would be a transfer some day, so they added in accomodations ("Bauvorleistung" or preparations ahead of actual construction), often whole station shells for the future line it would connect to. This resulted in a lot of short transfers even when lines were built decades apart. And it also resulted in a bunch of ghost stations, which have yet to be connected to lines.

neuronic an hour ago

Finally going to get a mental model of Jungfernstieg, Hamburg after a decade of living here. Wow.

gerikson 3 hours ago

This is impressive work!

  • jamesblonde 3 hours ago

    The product of extreme focus and obsessive dedication. It showed me my local subway station immediately and everything checked out. Great resource.