Bangladesh Railways Route Finder

[Mark_Lester]

I am going to Bangladesh in the New Year. As you wil be aware if you've ever looked at the place, finding any data on the country is hard enough. Finding a comprehensive listing of the timetable is impossible.
So I thought we should make one. I wanted to show you all this after I have got back as I will do a lot of work on the ground, but I thought you'd like to see where I am at so far
http://www.chalo.org.uk (temp domain name)
It's quite an impressive network, outside China India Japan and I guess Korea, I dont think anyone else in Asia has as much, certainly not as many different services. Here is a kml file you can best view in google earth. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7965866/comp.kml
It's not ready for publication yet. Apart from anything else the data, while grabbed mainly from the main website and tripbd, is highly dubious. I need to verify stuff with my own eyes and get something like a complete data set. I am currently working on getting a front facing db interface so that service providers, and ultimately anyone, can update data.
Anyway, Bangladesh, the Forgotten (Railway) Kingdom. Let's make anything more adventurous than Dhaka to Chittagong/Sylhet or Khulna achievable for the masses. Once we've got all the details worked out on this we can build one of these for anywhere that's got two rails and not much of a website.

 

[itfcfan]

Hi Mark,

I'd be interested to see what you've done for this, but the url isn't resolving at the moment...

I crawled a pretty-complete set of Chinese train times, geo-located the stations and recorded the results to a database to power a map-hack of Chinese trains when searching from A to B. That was in ~2009 when I lived in Shanghai and I've been trying to find a copy recently.

I'm quite impressed with the coverage of routes on rome2rio.com - unfortunately they don't cover Bangladesh yet, but they do cover India, China, Russia + Central Asia. Here's a sample:
http://www.rome2rio.com/s/Jammu/Thiruvananthapuram

Thanks,

John

 

[Mark_Lester]

Hi John.
That was running off my laptop, it should be running again now.
Yes I saw rome2rio. It's nicely done, and through some of the work I have started they may be able to take a GTFS feed for Bangladesh before long.
Longer term I am looking at crowd sourcing back of beyond bus data. To start with this is an ideally sized project, and has the immediate spin off of having some idea of where to go on my impending visit.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
I had another look at rome2rio. It is very slick looking, but I tried this
http://www.rome2rio.com/s/National-...e-Highway-97-Paneli-Moti-Gujarat-360480-India

and it just says "get a cab". Why it doesnt have the train for at least half the journey I dont know, but local buses are nowhere.
--- old post above --- --- new post below ---
this one demonstrates what I am saying a lot better http://www.rome2rio.com/s/Manali/Leh-India
the direct road between the two is one of, if not THE greatest taxi rides on the planet. It's not shown even as an alternative taxi run.
And it doesnt cost 90 quid.