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Models of European metro stations
- gield 1y agoIf you want to see a ridiculous amount of escalators, take a look at the Collblanc station in Barcelona. It takes 6 escalators to transfer between the L5 and L9S lines.
- rsynnott 1y agoBeen in that one when visiting Barcelona, transferring from the metro from the airport to the L5. I was not expecting the endless tower of escalators.
- undebuggable 1y agoI was never able to build mental model of Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Most of the times was simply following the signs and yup, the layout is complicated.
- pjmlp 1y agoVery nice work, consider also eventually adding Athens and Thessaloniki stations.
- rossant 1y agoThis guy has spent the last 10 years drawing about 2,547 stations around the world and making 3D models available to everyone. This might be the most amazing thing I have ever seen on the internet. Kudos.
- mezod 1y agoReally state of the art project and available in catalan, hell yeah! Hats off
- doabell 1y agoNitpick: there are a couple cities covered in North America as well, so not exactly European.
- prototype9849 1y agoI just had a quick look at a metro station I know, Sèvres Babylone in Paris, and it seems like there's a mistake in the model, adding a corridor that doesn't exist in the actual station.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoXing Zhilei's cats enter the chat and demand detailed texture maps.
- alkyon 1y agoVery nice. One nitpick: Malaga-Fuengirola C-1 line is suburban train and not metro (C stands for Cercanías) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1laga_Metro https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1laga_Metro Warsaw Metro has 36 station but only one is included. Metro systems of Kyiv, Minsk, Saint Petersburg and Moscow are not shown at all. Edit: Removed Vilnius as it has only plans for a metro system
- throw-the-towel 1y agoVilnius doesn't have a metro.
- alkyon 1y agoRight, my mistake.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoPerhaps it doesn't work on my browser, but all I see are low fidelity, wireframe/stick 3D model projections rendered as 2D images without much detail that could be made in a few minutes.
- tannhaeuser 1y agoJungfernstieg station in Hamburg has its own app to navigate out of the labyrinth even, with (I suppose) official 3D model data [1]. [1]: https://zaubar.com/app?url=zaubar.dev/hochbahn?scene=010 https://zaubar.com/app?url=zaubar.dev/hochbahn?scene=010
- Havoc 1y agoWow. The one relevant to me looks spot on accurate. Well done!
- hbarka 1y agoThis is a remarkable feat. Amazing. I’d like to add an interesting metric: density of subway/metro stations as measured by number of stations per square kilometer. In European cities, City, Metro System, Stations, City Area (km²), Density (stations/km²): 1. Paris, Metro de Paris, 244, 105, 2.32 2. Berlin, U‑Bahn only, 173, 892, ~0.19 3. London Underground (London Tube), ~270, 1,572, ~0.17 4. Madrid, Metro de Madrid, ~300, 605, ~0.50 Paris takes the lead, not just in Europe but globally, with ≈2.32 stations/km². Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris. Berlin (U‑Bahn only) and London have much lower densities (~0.17–0.19). Rome’s iconic metro is relatively sparse in terms of station density compared to other major European and Asian cities. Here’s how European and Asian cities stack: 1. Paris (~2.32 stations/km²) 2. Seoul (~1.27) 3. Madrid (~0.50) 4. Tokyo (~0.46) 5. London (~0.17) 6. Berlin (~0.19) 7. Hong Kong (~0.09) 8. Shanghai (~0.06) 9. Rome (~0.057) Seoul is highest among major Asian metro systems in terms of station concentration, making it the city in Asia with the densest metro network per square kilometer. Seoul has 768 stations in its metropolitan subway system spread across the city proper area of 605 km². By comparison, Tokyo’s combined metro (Tokyo Metro + Toei) has around 286 stations over ~621 km, giving a density of about 0.46 stations/km². Beijing has 523 stations but the city covers about 16,411 km²—yielding a much lower density (~0.03 stations/km²). Shanghai’s figure fluctuates due to rapid expansions: 409 unique stations from early 2025 data. In addition to density, another interesting metric is the number of street-level entrances (exit/entry points). Counting just stations ignores how many access points are available to the public. More entrances = better coverage, shorter walking distances, improved accessibility, especially in dense urban zones. Examples from Paris are: Saint‑Lazare station (Lines 3, 12, 13, 14) has 11 entrances. Hotel de Ville (Lines 1 & 11) has 7 entrances. Madeleine station (Lines 8, 12, 14) has 5 accesses with 7 separate entrances. Alesia station (Line 4) has 6 entrances. Opera station (Lines 3,7,8) has 3 main entrances. On average, Paris Metro stations have approximately 3–6 street-level entrances, with major hubs having 7–11. Paris doesn’t just have many stations, it maximizes them with multiple entry points, making its system exceptionally accessible over its territory. Seoul also scores similar in accessibility due to its exit-rich stations, especially in dense areas. Other major metros (Tokyo, Madrid, London) lag when entry points are factored in. I did not include US cities but I believe New York City might be notable.
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- diggan 1y agoThis is amazing, seems really detailed and leveraging official sources too, nice job! Since the author seems to be Catalan, I'll shamelessly plug a Metro-station-relevant event that is ongoing right now in Barcelona: There are many "ghost" metro stations in Barcelona that been popular (at least used to) urban exploring destinations. Two of those, Gaudí and Correus, are now opening to the public via tours, if you register at https://obrimelmetro.cat https://obrimelmetro.cat I've only visited Gaudí in a unofficial capacity like a decade ago, and haven't yet done the new tours myself so can't vouch how interesting they are, but seems there are only 5000 open spots in total. It seems like one of the tours is even during the night, so you get as close to the urban exploring experience as possible without having to run across active train tracks :)
- qweiopqweiop 1y agoThanks for sharing. London has these permanently, and while not cheap, they're very much worth it too.
- 62 1y agoI agree
- mtn92 1y agoThere is an article in ElPais from 2020 about the author, Albert Guillaumes, and his creative process. Very interesting read! (texts are in Spanish though) https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2020/08/20/articulo/1597915580_324598.html https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2020/08/20/articulo/159791558...
- amo1111 1y agoPretty impressive! Interesting shoutout to Längenfeldgasse (Vienna) for the cross-platform interchange. This is a pretty popular station to get to Schönbrunn Palace & Zoo, as such the majority of people changing stay on the platform and you really physically see the lean design in motion. This can probably only be done during the design phase otherwise to costly to ever change if it's even possible.
- igravious 1y agoAs the title suggests it is not a website of models of European metro stations because: (a) it contains models of North American stations, and (b) it does not contain stations from the St Petersburg[1] or Moscow metros which are significant European metros (the Moscow metro[2] is the longest in Europe) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Metro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro
- eigenspace 1y agoThis is pretty shockingly detailed. I zoomed into my city of Cologne germany thinking there'd be nothing showed here since we don't have a 'real' metro but rather a Stadtbahn system that's partially separate from the street grid and partially on the streets. Turns out they had excellent descriptions, models and info of all of our stations.
- Zagreus2142 1y agoThis is so neat! I hope at some point in the future cities and/or nation-states provide real time 3d environments of their built environment, with highlights for public transit, public spaces, food, government services, etc. Like if gis systems were better standardized and have these models integrated into them. Seattle has been a mess of last minute bus stop changes that aren't propagated to Google maps before you find yourself missing your bus. And even checking the metro page directly sometimes isn't up to date with sudden construction closures
- Anduia 1y agoThis again? The site is from 2012, does not use https, and has not changed since it was posted last time (7 times already)
- MarcelOlsz 1y agoPerfect.
- rtavares 1y agoI guess... https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- eqvinox 1y agoLeipzig is rather inconsistent. Hauptbahnhof (main station) is incomplete, or possibly overly pedantic; it's missing the "Westseite" station part where tram 9 stops (it doesn't pass through the 4 middle tracks where the other trams make their stops.) It's technically listed as a separate stop on plans, but last I checked it's considered the same stop for transfers (i.e. you don't get "walk from station A to station B" instructions.) It's also almost directly above the subterranean S-Bahn tracks that are shown, so just by location it should be included… (and it's also misspelled Leizpig, which is a little funny.) For Bayerischer Bahnhof and Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz, the tram stops are completely missing.
- nsavage 1y agoGiven the title, I was surprised to find Canadian metro stations on the list, even my native Ottawa!
- rsynnott 1y agoA while back I was in Berlin, and got lost in Nollendorfplatz station (which is not particularly _big_) for about ten minutes. Now, for various reasons I had been awake for about 36 hours, so mostly blamed it on that, but if this site is correct it confirms my suspicion that that is a weird station. U1 and U3 are on different levels for different directions!
- lansol 1y agoMaybe not common, but not an uncommon design. It is so you can transfer between lines by crossing the platform. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-platform_interchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-platform_interchange https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hXH_mLPzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5hXH_mLPzw
- lippihom 1y agoAwesome project.
- poppobit 1y agoThis is really cool — it reminds me of a Japanese subway map.
- gerikson 1y agoThis is impressive work!
- jamesblonde 1y agoThe product of extreme focus and obsessive dedication. It showed me my local subway station immediately and everything checked out. Great resource.
- dddw 1y agoNice! Would nice to have Maashaven Rotterdam, being the highest elevated one in the Netherlands. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maashaven_metro_station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maashaven_metro_station
- bambax 1y agoThis is insane. Never saw anything like it. One minor nitpick: zooming the map is very slow (maybe Leaflet is not the best choice?). And the main station in Paris is missing: Châtelet-Les Halles. Other than that, incredible work!! Amazing.
- guilamu 1y agoZooming working perfectly on my galaxy s23. Also, Châtelet les Halles is available just after 'Château d'eau".
- benoitg 1y agoChâtelet is there, you have to click on the 3D icon to experience the full majesty of its unending corridors in 3D
- diiiimaaaa 1y agoLeaflet should easily handle stuff like this if configured correctly. OP just slaps 3000 markers in a single layer, and each of them is an image element in dom. Should probably use some marker clustering for that.
- jdranczewski 1y agoA very cool project, and a great resource for people with reduced mobility - I semi-regularly use Transport for London's station drawings (linked on this website) over the official accessibility map, which doesn't differentiate between stairs and escalators for example.
- throw-qqqqq 1y agoHoly shit! This is an incredible piece of work. And they are almost all drawn “manually”! I am SO impressed by the dedication > For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 2,547 stations > A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station > Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s
- misterdata 1y agoSee also this 3D model of Shinjuku station, Tokyo: https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/ https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/
- neuronic 1y agoNice, while Shinjuku is much larger and more complex than others it has been really intuitive using it in the real world.
- ExpertAdvisor01 1y agoIs there a reason why moscow is missing ?
- spookie 1y agoThe guy has probably not been there. There are tons of others not included but it's fine, just a guy.
- paduc 1y agoProbably because he didn’t manage to visit.
- ahoka 1y agoIt says "European", not "Asian".
- ExpertAdvisor01 1y agoDid you skip geography?
- d1sxeyes 1y agoWest of the Urals is Europe. Istanbul is included, and that’s even more questionably European than Moscow, I think.
- a99c43f2d565504 1y agoIt's also not an exhaustive list anyway. At least Helsinki, Finland is missing. I think Finland is unambigiously Europe.
- wiether 1y agoIncredible work! I first looked at _regular_ stations, but once I understood that it was done by a single guy, I had to look at Paris' Mordor: Châtelet. The 3D view looks like an ants nest, as expected. Very impressed by the work done!
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoThe issue with Châtelet - aside from how crowded it is - is that it’s two stations masquerading as one, same as Montparnasse-Bienvenüe. Once you know what’s on which side and that the directions in the main hall are purposefully made to have you meander for flow control and you can just cut through, it gets a lot more manageable.
- prof-dr-ir 1y ago> Paris' Mordor: Châtelet. "Worst of all, the air was full of fumes; breathing was painful and difficult, and a dizziness came on them, so that they staggered and often fell. And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on."
- jddj 1y agoVery impressive work. I also learned something, which I'd always wondered cynically but never thought to investigate. The walking connection between lines at some stations in Barcelona seems so long as to not make sense, but it's explained here that at the time the different lines and stations were dug and extended independently by different companies. > Among the reasons for having such long corridors [in Barcelona] is the lack of planning or the vision of the metro network as a bunch of individual lines. As an example: line 1 and line 4 were extended to Urquinaona in 1932, but both lines were not connected until 1972, as they were originally operated by different companies.
- FearNotDaniel 1y agoIn London that’s also mostly true due to the patchwork history of different companies building different lines… however when King’s Cross/St Pancras was redeveloped a few years ago the “official” interchange route between Piccadilly and Victoria lines became much, much longer - minutes of walking compared to seconds. This site doesn’t cover that station, but does link to TfL’s own diagrams via IanVisits, and the reason is clear: at one end the platforms of both lines are almost touching - and I believe that shortcut staircase is still there if you ignore the signs and know where to find it - but the tourist friendly route is much more circuitous, going up to the mainline station and back again. I assume it helps to relieve congestion in an extremely busy station, I remember more than one occasion when they just have to close entry to the platforms during rush hour due to overcrowding.
- anticensor 1y agoWhy don't they block the shortcut to anyone but whitelisted people that applied beforehand?
- bambax 1y agoThat was also the case in NYC, and that's why there are so many long tunnels: each company tried to reach customers where they were.
- rsynnott 1y agoAre there at least multiple entrances? Dublin's main station, Connolly, is actually the amalgamation of two stations, one terminal station and one through station, which were originally owned by different companies before the rail system was nationalised. The only entrances are through the terminal station, so to get to the through lines, you need to walk for about 10 minutes through the terminal station (making them mostly pointless; it's usually quicker just to get on/off at the next station, which has a proper entrance). They are, apparently, _finally_ going to open a new entrance directly to the through lines, but they've been talking about it for years and I'll believe it when I see it.
- neuronic 1y agoFinally going to get a mental model of Jungfernstieg, Hamburg after a decade of living here. Wow.
- walterlw 1y agoVery impressive work. Was very saddened to see how Ukrainian Kyiv and Kharkiv stations were excluded. We have deep stations (like Arsenal'na at 105m that connects directly to the above-ground Dnipro station on a river bank), we have both Soviet-made and new stations. Also now they are doubly essential being used for both transportation and shelter during air raids by millions.
- rjsw 1y agoWhy make it easier for an enemy to plan an attack on them.
- moffkalast 1y agoSurely they already have detailed schematics? The USSR had a mapping project of hilarious scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
- pessimizer 1y agoReading comments like yours makes me wonder what kind of mental model of the world some people are working with. Russia does not need HN comments to tell them where train stations are.
- baubino 1y agoOf course they know where the stations are. But they don’t necessarily know the precise local of all the underground tunnels, exits, mechanical rooms, equipment, etc. The underground network is far more complex than what the consumer map hanging on the wall in the station shows.
- diggan 1y agoDuring the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves. Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.
- Dansvidania 1y agoWow. How? Incredibly impressive. Is there a public dataset that was used to build this?
- decimalenough 1y agoThe page footnote says that all sketches were hand drawn by the author over a 10 year period, and digitized during COVID by the power of extreme boredom.
- ljsprague 1y agoSo they are not renders of 3D models?
- sschueller 1y agoWow, very nice project. The ones in Zürich are not actually metro stations. They where built to be, but then the city voted against a metro. The stations that were already built were converted into tram stations. There where some complications like that fact the the tram is almost too tall to fit. The pantograph is almost fully compressed when the tram enters the tunnel. The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side. [1] https://cdn.dreso.com/fileadmin/_processed_/0/3/csm_Tierspital_final_3000X1680_web_2599de9f1f.webp https://cdn.dreso.com/fileadmin/_processed_/0/3/csm_Tierspit... [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramtunnel_Milchbuck%E2%80%93Schwamendingen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramtunnel_Milchbuck%E2%80%93S... [DE] EDIT: spelling
- shlip 1y agoI think you meant a pantograph instead of a photograph ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_(transport) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_(transport)
- sschueller 1y agoYes, it got autocorrected. Thanks
- rsynnott 1y ago> The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side. ... Wait, what? That seems like a serious false economy...
- fredoralive 1y agoBuses also have the doors only on one side usually, if you're just running trams on the surface in traffic you'll probably only need them on the pavement side of the vehicle. It's just got weird in this case the assumption the choice was made on changed after they already had a fleet.
- rsynnott 1y ago
- coreyh14444 1y ago[flagged]
- decimalenough 1y agoHere's a zoomable 3D model of the world's busiest train station, Shinjuku in Tokyo: https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/ https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/ 3.6 million passengers per day. Wikipedia: The main East Japan Railway Company (JR East) station and the directly adjacent private railways have a total of 35 platforms, an underground arcade, above-ground arcade and numerous hallways with another 17 platforms (52 total) that can be accessed through hallways to five directly connected stations without surfacing outside. The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.
- giveita 1y ago3.6m is crazy. That must be a decent % of the entire Tokyo pop.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoAlmost 10%. Framed like that it almost seems highly inefficient that so many are routed through this one station in particular. Presumably they could have had more direct routes to their destinations.
- giveita 1y agoAnd for context Tokyo is a huge metro. It can be 40 minutes between 2 places directly that any other country would consider cities by themselves. There is no such thing as CBD or downtown here IMO. This makes it more odd so many people route through one place.
- numpad0 1y agoThrowing in Japan into random topics in trains feel somewhat unfair. Most train fact sheets fail to include most Asian nations except Japan, often missing even Korea and Taiwan. Commuter trains in many East/Southeast Asian cities like Shanghai has developed to levels comparable to Tokyo. Trains in some Central Asian cities such as Mumbai were also always notorious for congestions. I think those should also be considered more often and at greater depths, Fermi estimated if need be, than we would be just keep dropping random Shinjuku facts left and right.
- itsmevictor 1y agoVery impressive project! Congrats.
- alvaro_calleja 1y agoOMG this is amazing! I've checked my station (Velázquez - Madrid) and it is 100% accurate. Also, the 3D stations are insane! ¡Enhorabona!
- ant6n 1y agoLove this project. Back in my transit blogging days, one of the themes was short and long transfers. And here this idea immediately starts surfacing just looking at the stations - the crazy mazes with long tunnels are cool to explore on paper, but suck for actual transfers. It adds slogs in the middle of the trips, and kind of discourages transit use because trips seem longer and more work. When scrolling down, the author actually includes a long discussion on the best possible transfer layouts! Many of the terrible stations over time are of course historically grown, evolved over time, and weren't the result of some maniac evil genius deciding to create miserable transfers. Systems are built sometimes over a hundred years, so a later station is added mostly where it can fit, not a as a result of some master plan. But there's also ways to deal with these issues, which can be found in Berlin. 1) for the recently opened "Unter den linden" station, which is a transfer between a new extension (u5) and a 100-year-old line (u6), a station on the old line was actually moved by 180m so that the transfer would be good. (That is, the old station was closed and a new station built a bit a distance away) 2) in general in Berlin, especially after WWII, a lot of the subway construction followed a very long term master plan (to the extend that West Berlin actually planned a network for all of Berlin, even though the East was in another country behind the iron curtain). When stations were built, the planners "knew" it would be a transfer some day, so they added in accomodations ("Bauvorleistung" or preparations ahead of actual construction), often whole station shells for the future line it would connect to. This resulted in a lot of short transfers even when lines were built decades apart. And it also resulted in a bunch of ghost stations, which have yet to be connected to lines.