9 ms·

OSRD: Open-Source Railway Designer

250 points by JNRowe 2y ago

999900000999 2y ago
Very cool! How hard is it to use though for someone without a real technical skill set ?
- TylerE 2y ago
  This appears to be governement software for Serious People doing Serious Work so I'm guessing... not very.
- emersion 2y ago
  Shouldn't be too hard, the tool is designed to be intuitive. That said, it may not be obvious how to use the planning part of the tool if you're not familiar with trains. The README contains instructions to start OSRD with docker-compose, if you want to try it out. Would be nice to have a public demo instance for sure!
devdao 2y ago
Looking forward to enjoying simulations of existing train networks
cbsmith 2y ago
I know I don't understand the domain at all, but I'm surprised that in this day and age you'd want a distributed system to do railway design. What aspect of the problem makes it unsuitable for running in a single process?
- solardev 2y ago
  Do you mean this? https://osrd.fr/en/docs/explanation/containers-architecture/ https://osrd.fr/en/docs/explanation/containers-architecture/ Could it just be the skillset that government has to? Web devs are a dime a dozen and you can probably find people to maintain/incrementally upgrade parts of it in the future easier than you could find an expert in some desktop GUI language (like .NET or Swift) that would still work after a few years of OS updates.
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    The web interface I get, but you can stand up a web interface with a single process built with a web server & an embedded database.
    - solardev 2y ago
      That's true. I don't know enough about their stack or use case or users to comment any further though, so I'll refrain from speculating.
- p_l 2y ago
  EDIT2: https://osrd.fr/en/docs/reference/architecture/services/ https://osrd.fr/en/docs/reference/architecture/services/ describes it better than I did :) EDIT: The goals of OSRD include realtime cooperation between multiple entities, including timetabling and planning on short term. Thus somewhat more complex application that is "multiplayer". Part of the issue is that desktop application delivery can be troublesome, logistic wise (especially now with various cross-platform environments dying off), so if you want to serve as wide group as possible with minimal logistical hassle, web might be the way. Then you might end up building it multiprocess because it's not like you have a monolith once you have complex browser-side state...
- emersion 2y ago
  The database needs to be shared between multiple actors: several teams of multiple people working in different companies. For instance, a team may be working on a single project such as a new railway or a large timetable change. Another example would be multiple freight companies requesting new routes. Additionally, the UI contains complicated elements such as custom maps with the railway network and custom graphs to visualize trains. There is a large ecosystem to implement this kind of stuff via Web technologies. A webapp also removes the need to distribute an installable binary on many different platforms (some may be quite restricted due to company policies) and many different machines (there are many users, see above). Note that the system uses a client-server architecture but isn't really distributed.
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    > Note that the system uses a client-server architecture but isn't really distributed. Yeah, I kind of agree. The thing is, it's orchestrating multiple containers to do the job. I can't figure out why you couldn't just have one container.
    - emersion 2y ago
      Part of the answer is that some of these services need to be scaled horizontally to be able to handle a significant number of users (e.g. tile servers, the core server), another part of the answer is architectural constraints (e.g. the core server needs to keep quite a bit of per-infrastructure data in RAM). (Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.)
      - cbsmith 2y ago
        > (Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.) Having done both, I'm always surprised when people say that it is more difficult to handle running N-copies of the same container than a heterogeneous set of containers. Sure, at really large scale you can glean efficiencies from it (which is why one might do it), but there's a lot of complexity that comes with that.
solardev 2y ago
This looks like a serious tool for real professionals to use. Cool! I wish they had some screenshots or videos of the process. In the meantime, if anyone's looking for gamified railroad-building (just for fun), check out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/ Or several more: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#transportation--route-management https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/tre...
- samsolomon 2y ago
  I'd highly recommend Railway Empire (and Railway Empire 2). It's the spiritual successor to Sid Meyer's Railroads! With a fair bit more content and features. EDIT: Railway Empire 2 is actually on sale right now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1644320/Railway_Empire_2/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1644320/Railway_Empire_2/
- resolutebat 2y ago
  What, no Simutrans? https://www.simutrans.com/en/ https://www.simutrans.com/en/ Don't be put off by the, uhh, legacy graphics and quirky UI, like Dwarf Fortress it has the the depth of decades of development (and the learning curve isn't quite as murderous).
- denysvitali 2y ago
  Thanks for the links, I've just discovered Mashinky [1], which looks like OpenTTD with amazing graphics. So cool! [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/
  - febusravenga 2y ago
    Oh no, I always envisioned and drewamed about 3d extension of TTD like this. Someone finally did it. I'm doomed.
sakjur 2y ago
This tool was the subject of a FOSDEM talk this year, which is available as a video on FOSDEM’s website: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2052-open-source-railway-designer-osrd-why-sncf-rseau-start-an-open-source-project-/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2052-open...
- Eckter2 2y ago
  If you're interested, there's actually several other team members who made talks about different parts of the project in the "railway and open transport" track Bending geographic maps for enhanced railway space-time diagrams: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/railways-and-open-transport/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/railways-and-open-tra... MARECO algorithm: how to drive a train using the least amount of energy: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2650-mareco-algorithm-how-to-drive-a-train-using-the-least-amount-of-energy/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2650-mare... Railway signaling: detecting conflicts in a complex world: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2665-railway-signaling-detecting-conflicts-in-a-complex-world/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2665-rail... And last year: Automated short-term train planning in OSRD: https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osrd/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osrd/ OpenStreetMap, one geographic database to rule them all?: https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osm/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osm/
rickdeckard 2y ago
Kudos for the EU (and as often, also here: France!) for supporting such initiatives to open up niche, often-invisible areas of a market to create new grounds for innovation and disruption! It doesn't work out in all cases, but in areas where it does it silently moves society forward!
- fffrantz 2y ago
  Here in Europe , a lot of former public utilities companies and the public sector in general has been really pushing niche OSS and OpenData projects in Europe. It's not always useful (rarely actually) for the average Joe, but it's definitely cool to see them embracing OSS and OpenData.
ur-whale 2y ago
I would have felt a tad better if such tool had originated in Switzerland rather than France. The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency. But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building and open sourcing something like this, I would love to see a video of it in use. [EDIT]: I skimmed through the documentation, and I haven't found anything pertaining to monte carlo simulation of a complex railway system subject to external perturbations, as in: throw a bunch of unexpected events (accidents, breakdowns, blockages, late trains from a neighboring country entering the system, etc...) and see how well the whole network's efficiency holds under such disturbances. Maybe I am misunderstanding the purpose of the system. [EDIT 2]: OK, found something. Such a "how well does the network do under perturbation" is not part of the feature set yet but seemed to be in the cards. From [1], in section "Operations studies / Planned features include", I read: "automated timetable robustness assessment using stochastic simulation". [1]https://osrd.fr/en/about/use-case/#%C3%A9tudes-dexploitation https://osrd.fr/en/about/use-case/#%C3%A9tudes-dexploitation
- arbfay 2y ago
  Seriously... This is like not trusting the cooking book of an American chef because America has poor food quality. Or British chef in Britain. Individuals' talents are not bound by their countries' failures and successes. And comparatively the French train network is excellent, and faster than the Swiss network. No, I'm not French at all.
  - ur-whale 2y ago
    > And comparatively the French train network is excellent I don't think we're talking about the same country here. Are you a regular user ? "Comparatively" ? Sure, if you compare it to the US train network or to Uganda's ... "comparatively", you can always find something to compare to that makes you look excellent.
    - sofixa 2y ago

250 points by JNRowe 2y ago

999900000999 2y ago

Very cool! How hard is it to use though for someone without a real technical skill set ?

TylerE 2y ago
This appears to be governement software for Serious People doing Serious Work so I'm guessing... not very.
emersion 2y ago
Shouldn't be too hard, the tool is designed to be intuitive. That said, it may not be obvious how to use the planning part of the tool if you're not familiar with trains. The README contains instructions to start OSRD with docker-compose, if you want to try it out. Would be nice to have a public demo instance for sure!

devdao 2y ago

Looking forward to enjoying simulations of existing train networks

cbsmith 2y ago

I know I don't understand the domain at all, but I'm surprised that in this day and age you'd want a distributed system to do railway design. What aspect of the problem makes it unsuitable for running in a single process?

solardev 2y ago
Do you mean this? https://osrd.fr/en/docs/explanation/containers-architecture/ https://osrd.fr/en/docs/explanation/containers-architecture/ Could it just be the skillset that government has to? Web devs are a dime a dozen and you can probably find people to maintain/incrementally upgrade parts of it in the future easier than you could find an expert in some desktop GUI language (like .NET or Swift) that would still work after a few years of OS updates.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  The web interface I get, but you can stand up a web interface with a single process built with a web server & an embedded database.
  - solardev 2y ago
    That's true. I don't know enough about their stack or use case or users to comment any further though, so I'll refrain from speculating.
p_l 2y ago
EDIT2: https://osrd.fr/en/docs/reference/architecture/services/ https://osrd.fr/en/docs/reference/architecture/services/ describes it better than I did :) EDIT: The goals of OSRD include realtime cooperation between multiple entities, including timetabling and planning on short term. Thus somewhat more complex application that is "multiplayer". Part of the issue is that desktop application delivery can be troublesome, logistic wise (especially now with various cross-platform environments dying off), so if you want to serve as wide group as possible with minimal logistical hassle, web might be the way. Then you might end up building it multiprocess because it's not like you have a monolith once you have complex browser-side state...
emersion 2y ago
The database needs to be shared between multiple actors: several teams of multiple people working in different companies. For instance, a team may be working on a single project such as a new railway or a large timetable change. Another example would be multiple freight companies requesting new routes. Additionally, the UI contains complicated elements such as custom maps with the railway network and custom graphs to visualize trains. There is a large ecosystem to implement this kind of stuff via Web technologies. A webapp also removes the need to distribute an installable binary on many different platforms (some may be quite restricted due to company policies) and many different machines (there are many users, see above). Note that the system uses a client-server architecture but isn't really distributed.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  > Note that the system uses a client-server architecture but isn't really distributed. Yeah, I kind of agree. The thing is, it's orchestrating multiple containers to do the job. I can't figure out why you couldn't just have one container.
  - emersion 2y ago
    Part of the answer is that some of these services need to be scaled horizontally to be able to handle a significant number of users (e.g. tile servers, the core server), another part of the answer is architectural constraints (e.g. the core server needs to keep quite a bit of per-infrastructure data in RAM). (Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.)
    - cbsmith 2y ago
      > (Of course, it's completely possible to build a single container which runs all of the services in parallel, but then monitoring/scaling/availability/etc are more difficult to handle.) Having done both, I'm always surprised when people say that it is more difficult to handle running N-copies of the same container than a heterogeneous set of containers. Sure, at really large scale you can glean efficiencies from it (which is why one might do it), but there's a lot of complexity that comes with that.

solardev 2y ago

This looks like a serious tool for real professionals to use. Cool! I wish they had some screenshots or videos of the process. In the meantime, if anyone's looking for gamified railroad-building (just for fun), check out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/ Or several more: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/tree/main?tab=readme-ov-file#transportation--route-management https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/tre...

samsolomon 2y ago
I'd highly recommend Railway Empire (and Railway Empire 2). It's the spiritual successor to Sid Meyer's Railroads! With a fair bit more content and features. EDIT: Railway Empire 2 is actually on sale right now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1644320/Railway_Empire_2/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1644320/Railway_Empire_2/
resolutebat 2y ago
What, no Simutrans? https://www.simutrans.com/en/ https://www.simutrans.com/en/ Don't be put off by the, uhh, legacy graphics and quirky UI, like Dwarf Fortress it has the the depth of decades of development (and the learning curve isn't quite as murderous).
denysvitali 2y ago
Thanks for the links, I've just discovered Mashinky [1], which looks like OpenTTD with amazing graphics. So cool! [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/
- febusravenga 2y ago
  Oh no, I always envisioned and drewamed about 3d extension of TTD like this. Someone finally did it. I'm doomed.

sakjur 2y ago

This tool was the subject of a FOSDEM talk this year, which is available as a video on FOSDEM’s website: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2052-open-source-railway-designer-osrd-why-sncf-rseau-start-an-open-source-project-/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2052-open...

Eckter2 2y ago
If you're interested, there's actually several other team members who made talks about different parts of the project in the "railway and open transport" track Bending geographic maps for enhanced railway space-time diagrams: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/railways-and-open-transport/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/track/railways-and-open-tra... MARECO algorithm: how to drive a train using the least amount of energy: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2650-mareco-algorithm-how-to-drive-a-train-using-the-least-amount-of-energy/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2650-mare... Railway signaling: detecting conflicts in a complex world: https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2665-railway-signaling-detecting-conflicts-in-a-complex-world/ https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-2665-rail... And last year: Automated short-term train planning in OSRD: https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osrd/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osrd/ OpenStreetMap, one geographic database to rule them all?: https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osm/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/rot_osm/

rickdeckard 2y ago

Kudos for the EU (and as often, also here: France!) for supporting such initiatives to open up niche, often-invisible areas of a market to create new grounds for innovation and disruption! It doesn't work out in all cases, but in areas where it does it silently moves society forward!

fffrantz 2y ago
Here in Europe , a lot of former public utilities companies and the public sector in general has been really pushing niche OSS and OpenData projects in Europe. It's not always useful (rarely actually) for the average Joe, but it's definitely cool to see them embracing OSS and OpenData.

ur-whale 2y ago

I would have felt a tad better if such tool had originated in Switzerland rather than France. The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency. But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building and open sourcing something like this, I would love to see a video of it in use. [EDIT]: I skimmed through the documentation, and I haven't found anything pertaining to monte carlo simulation of a complex railway system subject to external perturbations, as in: throw a bunch of unexpected events (accidents, breakdowns, blockages, late trains from a neighboring country entering the system, etc...) and see how well the whole network's efficiency holds under such disturbances. Maybe I am misunderstanding the purpose of the system. [EDIT 2]: OK, found something. Such a "how well does the network do under perturbation" is not part of the feature set yet but seemed to be in the cards. From [1], in section "Operations studies / Planned features include", I read: "automated timetable robustness assessment using stochastic simulation". [1]https://osrd.fr/en/about/use-case/#%C3%A9tudes-dexploitation https://osrd.fr/en/about/use-case/#%C3%A9tudes-dexploitation

arbfay 2y ago
Seriously... This is like not trusting the cooking book of an American chef because America has poor food quality. Or British chef in Britain. Individuals' talents are not bound by their countries' failures and successes. And comparatively the French train network is excellent, and faster than the Swiss network. No, I'm not French at all.
- ur-whale 2y ago
  > And comparatively the French train network is excellent I don't think we're talking about the same country here. Are you a regular user ? "Comparatively" ? Sure, if you compare it to the US train network or to Uganda's ... "comparatively", you can always find something to compare to that makes you look excellent.
  - sofixa 2y ago