TrainLookout Beta: What you need to know
Welcome to the TrainLookout Beta. Firstly, thank you for taking the time to try it out. It’s a work in progress, but we’re excited to put to the world what we’ve been working on.
What works
You can create and edit journeys with full mapping support, including a route preview prior to adding and up to 5 intermediate points to inform routing. Station search with autocomplete suggestions is the main way to select the origin & destination but by country alphabetic lists of stations are available as well if needed.
All journeys are displayed on a map, with colour and style separation for past & upcoming. You can download the map to an image for sharing on social media or your own use.
All journeys are listed below the map, including the date and length. You may filter by year, past/upcoming and by assigned trip.
In user preferences, you can select the optional operator field, as well as opt-in or out of promotional emails from TrainLookout.
What’s not quite there just yet
The big one: translation
Station names are mostly in native languages only, with a small number of exceptions, mostly concerning major stations such as Wien Hauptbahnhof/Vienna Central Station o Københavns Hovedbanegård/Copenhagen Central. This is similar to, for example, DB Navigator and we expect that to not cause issues for the majority of users whilst having a long-term goal of improving the usability.
Bulgaria and Serbia is an example of a country with the majority of stations untranslated and only available in Cyrillic. Unfortunately, our search is also having issues working with non-Latin alphabets. We are working on a solution to this, but in the meantime, we suggest using the by country search option.
Countries
We aim to support all countries with an active rail service. With over 80 countries currently available, most of your journeys should be covered. Our gaps are currently in Central & South America, as well as Africa, particularly for countries with sparse/tourist only services.
A few smaller things
There are also issues with creating journeys from a small number of individual stations. The most notable example is Basel SBB (and select other stations in Switzerland). We’re looking to rectify those issues as soon as possible. If you notice any issues with other stations, please reach out.
You might notice a few more things, such as not being able to edit trips (only organisers, individual journeys are fully editable), some elements of the UI looking slightly unrefined as a work in progress.
If you are interested in our creator mode that’s in the works, we will have more information coming soon.
How you can help improve TrainLookout
We welcome and greatly encourage feedback. You can reach us via:
Reports of issues concerning data (missing/incorrect stations, mistranslations or routing) are especially important so they may be rectified as soon as possible.
Suggestions and comments are welcome. If you have any questions as well, please do not hesitate to ask!