Wander
trains, slowly
A rail-first route planner that optimises for what you would see out of the window rather than how quickly you would arrive.
Every planner optimises for the wrong thing
Ask any travel tool how to get from A to B and it will answer with the fastest route, because speed is the one variable everyone agreed to measure. This is correct for a commute and completely wrong for the reason most people take a train in the first place.
I take the train instead of flying whenever the trip allows it. Nothing I could find would let me say so — that I have eleven hours either way and would like to spend them somewhere worth looking at.
Scoring a leg
Wander scores each leg of a journey on things a timetable knows but never surfaces. Whether you are on it during daylight, worked out from the departure time and the latitude you will be crossing. Which side of the carriage the view is on, from the bearing of the track. How much of the leg is tunnel, elevation gain, coastline, and how many times you change.
None of this is exotic data. It is all sitting in GTFS feeds and open elevation tiles, and it is all thrown away the moment a planner decides its job is to minimise a single number.
What it changed about the UI
- The timeline is the interfaceNot a list of options. One horizontal line per route, with daylight, elevation and changes drawn on it, so two routes are compared by looking rather than by reading.
- Sort by anything but timeThe sort control offers scenery, daylight, fewest changes, and time last. Putting time last is an opinion, and it is the whole product.
- It works on a trainWhich is to say, offline. Timetables go into a SQLite database compiled to WASM and cached, so the planner keeps working through the ninety minutes of no signal that the trip it planned will contain.
Putting time last in the sort order is an opinion. It is also the entire product.