6 ms·

All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)

254 points by momentmaker 4mo ago

kalleboo 4mo ago
Never seen this one before: "[Error] SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"
- klabb3 4mo ago
  I had a near-instant crash too, but different kind. Firefox iOS. The vibes are leaking
  - busymom0 4mo ago
    On iOS, all browsers use WKWebView behind the scenes as required by Apple. So crash behavior is similar to Safari.
panny 4mo ago
It would be interesting to see a negative bar with station closures as well. And some way to zoom the map would be nice. As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those. Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....
- rsynnott 4mo ago
  This is a station which exists solely for transfer between two lines. It has no entrance. Idea always made me a bit nervous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manulla_Junction_railway_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manulla_Junction_railway_stati...
  - fluoridation 4mo ago
    I'd like to see something like that but on a subway. Just a platform and two tunnels with no stairs. If the service stops you're SOL and have to hoof it down the tracks.
    - lmm 4mo ago
      Friedrichstraße was famously like that during the Cold War (West Berliners riding the lines were not permitted to exit into East Berlin), although of course the stairs physically existed. I think it's unusual for an underground station to be built without digging from the surface, so there's normally at least a fire escape.
      - em-bee 4mo ago
        i hope that safety regulations everywhere simply would not allow any station to be built without a way out.
Innittech 4mo ago
[flagged]
- panny 4mo ago
  Oh, someone is jealous. His country will never be responsible for the longest underwater tunnel in the world. How will he continue to tell himself he is the greatest country? :)
  - Innittech 4mo ago
    [flagged]
_alternator_ 4mo ago
Cool idea! Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization. I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?). Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.
- zzleeper 4mo ago
  I created pages with Claude before and it's very very obvious when you see one. From the font choice to the color palette, and the style of the boxes. In fact if anyone has an effective prompt that says "please don't make this look like the average Claude page" please post it!
  - emodendroket 4mo ago
    Not sure that's necessarily any bigger a deal than when every Web site had the "Bootstrap look."
  - ageitgey 4mo ago
    Anthropic's own frontend-design skill attempts to do that. You can install it in Claude Code, or you can tweak it to be closer to your own style: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/frontend-design/skills/frontend-design/SKILL.md https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/... But what I find works best is to point Claude at a design system documentation website (your own company's or another public source) and tell it to use that design style. It usually does OK, and the results are usually much more in line with that style and not as Claude-y.
    - rlorenzo 4mo ago
      That skill has not been updated since its release. I would suggest checking out this project for a boost in design skills: https://impeccable.style https://impeccable.style
decimalenough 4mo ago
Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_i...
- wolvoleo 4mo ago
  To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation and people getting wealthier and buying cars. In my country a ton of lines have closed down too and ourv population only grows.
  - panny 4mo ago
    >people getting wealthier and buying cars Haha, my experience is people buying cars feel poorer, not wealthier. Car payments, maintenance, insurance, taxes, fuel... and as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL. Time to start paying for the next one.
    - wolvoleo 4mo ago
      True but at least where I'm from it's a huge status symbol. Every time a neighbour gets a new car the whole street is jealous and talking about it. I personally find driving very stressful and wasteful of my time so I hate cars. Even when I had one from work. In fact that was worse because they only give you a work car because the job involves loads of driving. Even though the tax man wanted lots of money for something I didn't even want in the first place.
    - linguae 4mo ago
      Unfortunately when you live in a place (like most American cities) where they’re largely built under the assumption people will drive everywhere, a car is essentially required. It’s expensive owning and maintaining a car, but it also feels demoralizing dealing with limited public transportation and neighborhoods that aren’t walkable. There are walkable metro areas in the United States, but they tend to be very expensive, sometimes more expensive than living in a suburb or exurb and dealing with the cost of commuting. I grew up poor; dealing with hour-long bus waits, late buses, multiple transfers, and limited choices is a powerful motivation to save up for a car.
chamomeal 4mo ago
Super cool but I did get this error while scrolling the timeline on safari/iOS Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading jivx.com (see the browser console for more information).
- jorisw 4mo ago
  Yep, seems to refer to "SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"
  - kccqzy 4mo ago
    I hate the History API especially pushState. Even with this limit of 100 times per 10 seconds it still pollutes my browsing history too much. I need to vibe code an extension that makes pushState/replaceState noops on all webpages.
    - IncreasePosts 4mo ago
      Then you'll discover many pages are SPAs in disguise.
      - thih9 4mo ago
        Such as? Because joke’s on you, my browser gets so slow that I know when a page is a SPA, even when it uses History API.
    - jorisw 4mo ago
      Seems like you hate the abuse of the API more than the API itself. For Single Page Apps it makes sense to support the Back button by, based on merit, populating the history synthetically
    - js2 4mo ago
      StopTheMadnessPro > Protect History. https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/ https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/
LurkandComment 4mo ago
That whole website is just beautiful. I'd love to see more work by the designer.
- kevinwang 4mo ago
  Good/bad news: you will definitely see more work by them -- this style of website is clearly the output of a coding agent, maybe Claude Code.
- elxr 4mo ago
  It's beautiful I agree, but that "designer" is just claude opus. Lots of examples on x and on reddit of similarly styled apps made with the help of opus.
game_the0ry 4mo ago
Very cool. I am a sucker for good design and this site was beautiful to look at. I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why?
- throwup238 4mo ago
  > I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why? They were originally built for military logistics to move troops, guns, and supplies around the country.
  - game_the0ry 4mo ago
    You have to appreciate how people would think long term back then. We lost that quality -- our corporate leaders can't think past 1 quarter.
- binary0010 4mo ago
  It's just default Claude design.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
hyperific 4mo ago
On mobile pressing play makes the timeline go from 1872 to 2026 in a single step.
- madlad77 4mo ago
  On Brave desktop as well
- branon 4mo ago
  This occurs for me on desktop as well (Firefox, Linux)
panick21_ 4mo ago
Would be cool to somehow see how the volumes of passengers grows as well. I also want to see if we have this information for Switzerland.
animanoir 4mo ago
[dead]
cpa 4mo ago
Super cool! I did something similar (in terms of visualisation) a few years back, a map of cities by their birthdate on wikipedia: https://cpa.github.io/wiki-cities-birthdates/ https://cpa.github.io/wiki-cities-birthdates/
psanchez 4mo ago
I love the fractal nature of it.
aanet 4mo ago
Tell-tale signs of AI-built UX: - Extremely low contrast typography - Serif typefaces with body in sans serif - Black + red/maroon color combo - tiny, tiny typefaces
echelon_musk 4mo ago
Stations, surely?!
Galus 4mo ago
So tired of all the AI picking this terrible font.
helterskelter 4mo ago
Fun bit of trivia: Japanese train stations each have their own custom stamp, and if you have a piece of paper or a notebook they'll stamp it for you at the ticket booth (this is a fairly common thing to do there). If you get an A5 notebook, it's a neat way to document a trip -- one stamp for your departure station, one for your arrival.
- spelk 4mo ago
  Sadly not all of them, much to my ill discovery! They are fun souvenirs and I encourage everyone to collect them if they want a free momento (ideally bring your own stamp pad).
mulmen 4mo ago
I’m not sure what I am looking at. I see a number going up but the methodology is missing and analysis is lacking. Has Japan ever closed a railway station? Are the 1872 stations the first ever in Japan? Is this a plot of all stations ever constructed or just the ones that still exist? Has the number of stations ever gone down? What events are corollated with building booms and what direction does the arrow of causality point?
totetsu 4mo ago
Did they catch Perry's Miniature Train? https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/image/zoom/bdr:304537/ https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/image/zoom/bdr:...
adamofeden 4mo ago
This is awesome! The website screams claude to me. I'm not bashing it, in fact I think it's great. That was just my first thought when I opened the webpage. Good transition into the learning tool as well.
aussieguy1234 4mo ago
At first glance I thought this was a photo gallery. Still interesting, although a photo gallery would have been more interesting, at least for me
akashwadhwani35 4mo ago
I made something similar, with sound - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo
Ngraph 4mo ago
Japanese from the inaka here. My contribution to this dataset: nothing. No station in my town, never was one. The nearest line is an hour by car and it's openly next on the chopping block.
sagotly 4mo ago
really cool wow

254 points by momentmaker 4mo ago

Never seen this one before: "[Error] SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"

klabb3 4mo ago
I had a near-instant crash too, but different kind. Firefox iOS. The vibes are leaking
- busymom0 4mo ago
  On iOS, all browsers use WKWebView behind the scenes as required by Apple. So crash behavior is similar to Safari.

panny 4mo ago

It would be interesting to see a negative bar with station closures as well. And some way to zoom the map would be nice. As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those. Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....

rsynnott 4mo ago
This is a station which exists solely for transfer between two lines. It has no entrance. Idea always made me a bit nervous: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manulla_Junction_railway_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manulla_Junction_railway_stati...
- fluoridation 4mo ago
  I'd like to see something like that but on a subway. Just a platform and two tunnels with no stairs. If the service stops you're SOL and have to hoof it down the tracks.
  - lmm 4mo ago
    Friedrichstraße was famously like that during the Cold War (West Berliners riding the lines were not permitted to exit into East Berlin), although of course the stairs physically existed. I think it's unusual for an underground station to be built without digging from the surface, so there's normally at least a fire escape.
    - em-bee 4mo ago
      i hope that safety regulations everywhere simply would not allow any station to be built without a way out.

Innittech 4mo ago

[flagged]

panny 4mo ago
Oh, someone is jealous. His country will never be responsible for the longest underwater tunnel in the world. How will he continue to tell himself he is the greatest country? :)
- Innittech 4mo ago
  [flagged]

_alternator_ 4mo ago

Cool idea! Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization. I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?). Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.

zzleeper 4mo ago
I created pages with Claude before and it's very very obvious when you see one. From the font choice to the color palette, and the style of the boxes. In fact if anyone has an effective prompt that says "please don't make this look like the average Claude page" please post it!
- emodendroket 4mo ago
  Not sure that's necessarily any bigger a deal than when every Web site had the "Bootstrap look."
- ageitgey 4mo ago
  Anthropic's own frontend-design skill attempts to do that. You can install it in Claude Code, or you can tweak it to be closer to your own style: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/frontend-design/skills/frontend-design/SKILL.md https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/... But what I find works best is to point Claude at a design system documentation website (your own company's or another public source) and tell it to use that design style. It usually does OK, and the results are usually much more in line with that style and not as Claude-y.
  - rlorenzo 4mo ago
    That skill has not been updated since its release. I would suggest checking out this project for a boost in design skills: https://impeccable.style https://impeccable.style

decimalenough 4mo ago

Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_i...

wolvoleo 4mo ago
To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation and people getting wealthier and buying cars. In my country a ton of lines have closed down too and ourv population only grows.
- panny 4mo ago
  >people getting wealthier and buying cars Haha, my experience is people buying cars feel poorer, not wealthier. Car payments, maintenance, insurance, taxes, fuel... and as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL. Time to start paying for the next one.
  - wolvoleo 4mo ago
    True but at least where I'm from it's a huge status symbol. Every time a neighbour gets a new car the whole street is jealous and talking about it. I personally find driving very stressful and wasteful of my time so I hate cars. Even when I had one from work. In fact that was worse because they only give you a work car because the job involves loads of driving. Even though the tax man wanted lots of money for something I didn't even want in the first place.
  - linguae 4mo ago
    Unfortunately when you live in a place (like most American cities) where they’re largely built under the assumption people will drive everywhere, a car is essentially required. It’s expensive owning and maintaining a car, but it also feels demoralizing dealing with limited public transportation and neighborhoods that aren’t walkable. There are walkable metro areas in the United States, but they tend to be very expensive, sometimes more expensive than living in a suburb or exurb and dealing with the cost of commuting. I grew up poor; dealing with hour-long bus waits, late buses, multiple transfers, and limited choices is a powerful motivation to save up for a car.

chamomeal 4mo ago

Super cool but I did get this error while scrolling the timeline on safari/iOS Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading jivx.com (see the browser console for more information).

jorisw 4mo ago
Yep, seems to refer to "SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"
- kccqzy 4mo ago
  I hate the History API especially pushState. Even with this limit of 100 times per 10 seconds it still pollutes my browsing history too much. I need to vibe code an extension that makes pushState/replaceState noops on all webpages.
  - IncreasePosts 4mo ago
    Then you'll discover many pages are SPAs in disguise.
    - thih9 4mo ago
      Such as? Because joke’s on you, my browser gets so slow that I know when a page is a SPA, even when it uses History API.
  - jorisw 4mo ago
    Seems like you hate the abuse of the API more than the API itself. For Single Page Apps it makes sense to support the Back button by, based on merit, populating the history synthetically
  - js2 4mo ago
    StopTheMadnessPro > Protect History. https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/ https://underpassapp.com/StopTheMadness/

LurkandComment 4mo ago

That whole website is just beautiful. I'd love to see more work by the designer.

kevinwang 4mo ago
Good/bad news: you will definitely see more work by them -- this style of website is clearly the output of a coding agent, maybe Claude Code.
elxr 4mo ago
It's beautiful I agree, but that "designer" is just claude opus. Lots of examples on x and on reddit of similarly styled apps made with the help of opus.

game_the0ry 4mo ago

Very cool. I am a sucker for good design and this site was beautiful to look at. I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why?

throwup238 4mo ago
> I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why? They were originally built for military logistics to move troops, guns, and supplies around the country.
- game_the0ry 4mo ago
  You have to appreciate how people would think long term back then. We lost that quality -- our corporate leaders can't think past 1 quarter.
binary0010 4mo ago
It's just default Claude design.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

hyperific 4mo ago

On mobile pressing play makes the timeline go from 1872 to 2026 in a single step.

madlad77 4mo ago
On Brave desktop as well
branon 4mo ago
This occurs for me on desktop as well (Firefox, Linux)

panick21_ 4mo ago

Would be cool to somehow see how the volumes of passengers grows as well. I also want to see if we have this information for Switzerland.

animanoir 4mo ago

[dead]

cpa 4mo ago

Super cool! I did something similar (in terms of visualisation) a few years back, a map of cities by their birthdate on wikipedia: https://cpa.github.io/wiki-cities-birthdates/ https://cpa.github.io/wiki-cities-birthdates/

psanchez 4mo ago

I love the fractal nature of it.

aanet 4mo ago

Tell-tale signs of AI-built UX: - Extremely low contrast typography - Serif typefaces with body in sans serif - Black + red/maroon color combo - tiny, tiny typefaces

echelon_musk 4mo ago

Stations, surely?!

Galus 4mo ago

So tired of all the AI picking this terrible font.

helterskelter 4mo ago

Fun bit of trivia: Japanese train stations each have their own custom stamp, and if you have a piece of paper or a notebook they'll stamp it for you at the ticket booth (this is a fairly common thing to do there). If you get an A5 notebook, it's a neat way to document a trip -- one stamp for your departure station, one for your arrival.

spelk 4mo ago
Sadly not all of them, much to my ill discovery! They are fun souvenirs and I encourage everyone to collect them if they want a free momento (ideally bring your own stamp pad).

mulmen 4mo ago

I’m not sure what I am looking at. I see a number going up but the methodology is missing and analysis is lacking. Has Japan ever closed a railway station? Are the 1872 stations the first ever in Japan? Is this a plot of all stations ever constructed or just the ones that still exist? Has the number of stations ever gone down? What events are corollated with building booms and what direction does the arrow of causality point?

totetsu 4mo ago

Did they catch Perry's Miniature Train? https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/image/zoom/bdr:304537/ https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/image/zoom/bdr:...

adamofeden 4mo ago

This is awesome! The website screams claude to me. I'm not bashing it, in fact I think it's great. That was just my first thought when I opened the webpage. Good transition into the learning tool as well.

aussieguy1234 4mo ago

At first glance I thought this was a photo gallery. Still interesting, although a photo gallery would have been more interesting, at least for me

akashwadhwani35 4mo ago

I made something similar, with sound - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo

Ngraph 4mo ago

Japanese from the inaka here. My contribution to this dataset: nothing. No station in my town, never was one. The nearest line is an hour by car and it's openly next on the chopping block.

sagotly 4mo ago

really cool wow