The story behind the world's first geolocated atlas of cab view railway videos.
Rails World View is a free, open atlas that plots cab view videos — footage shot from the train driver's window — on an interactive world map. Every station along each journey is geolocated, so you can explore railways anywhere on Earth by simply clicking on the map.
The project is built on the CabRail dataset: approximately 57,000 YouTube videos classified by AI and matched to real-world stations from OpenStreetMap. Each video is tagged with route information (departure, intermediate stops, arrival), train type, traction, landscape, weather, and more.
Videos are discovered through keyword-based YouTube searches covering hundreds of railway lines in every country. An AI pipeline classifies each video (type, route, traction, etc.) and a matching algorithm links the route to OpenStreetMap station nodes, producing the geolocated dataset you see on the map.
Some geolocations are approximate — especially those tagged as "lasco" (loose match). The community page will soon let registered users correct mistakes, add missing stations, and submit new videos. Every contribution makes the atlas more accurate for everyone.
PostgreSQL + PostGIS for the spatial database, FastAPI for the backend, MapLibre GL JS for the interactive map, and vanilla JavaScript for the frontend. The whole thing runs on open-source tools and open data.
Station data from OpenStreetMap contributors. Video metadata from the YouTube Data API. Map tiles by CARTO. Built with care by a rail cam lover.