Skip to content

railwayhistory/railmap

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

railmap

This repository contains the map renderer behind the Railway History Map. It takes a map described through a simple language based on a set of paths, renders them as bitmap tiles, and provides those via a built-in HTTP server.

The map resulting from the description in the sibling railwayhistory/map repository can be viewed at map.railwayhistory.org.

Running locally

You can run the renderer locally. For this you need a local copy of the map definition and point to its map configuration config.toml using the -m option.

You can limit the regions rendered by specifying the ones you want with the -r option. This is mostly helpful to decrease the startup time during map editing. The available regions are given in the map configuration file.

By default, the renderer will listen on 127.0.0.1:8080 but you can change this through the -l option. It provides a simple debug view of the map, so, you can simply point your browser to the address, e.g., http://127.0.0.1:8080/ if you haven’t changed the default.

Available Layers

The renderer provides an HTTP server that provides multiple layers. Each produces tiles in spherical mercator projection using the usual OSM tile layer convention for addressing tiles using z, x, and y coordinates. The convention is

/{layer}/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

(It can also produces SVG tiles by replacing .png with .svg but the results are likely going to look a bit odd).

The following layers are currently available:

  • el: railway lines colored according to their electrification scheme,
  • el-lat: the el layer but with names transliterated into Latin script,
  • el-num: Railway History Database line number colored for use with the el layer,
  • pax: railway lines colored according to the passenger service provided,
  • pax-lat: the pax layer but with names transliterated into Latin script,
  • pax-num: timetable line numbers,
  • border: borders contours.

The rendered map publishes these layers at https://map.railwayhistory.org/rail/. E.g., if you want to use the el layer, the usual configuration string is https://map.railwayhistory.org/rail/el/{z}/{x}/{y}.png.