[Freak_NL]

Not at all. This appears to be an actual router for rail, not a router for public transport by train. That is, if you happen to own a nice locomotive, and miraculously have unimpeded direct access to all railways, then this tool will be a useful planner.

For all of us poor folk lacking trains and quite seriously high level political influence, this is a theoretical routing tool for planning possible rail routes. Hence the support of its development by the SNCF.

[mschuster91]

> That is, if you happen to own a nice locomotive, and miraculously have unimpeded direct access to all railways, then this tool will be a useful planner.

By law, that already is the case across Europe - all you need is a commercial entity, a locomotive (or multiple) that support all the voltages and signalling/trackside security systems used on the route, carriages that are certified (freight cars usually are Europe-wide, passenger cars run under RIC) and operators that have "Streckenkunde" (=they know where signals, switches, street passes etc. are on a route).

There are a handful of people doing just that, in Germany Roland Sandkuhl / LokRapid has gotten incredibly famous after a TV show featuring him and his old-timer Class 219 locomotive has gone viral [1].

[1] https://www.ndr.de/fernsehen/sendungen/hallo_niedersachsen/R...

[johannes1234321]

> There are a handful of people doing just that, in Germany Roland Sandkuhl / LokRapid has gotten incredibly famous after a TV show featuring him and his old-timer Class 219 locomotive has gone viral [1].

Mind that in a legal sense he operates no EVU (Eisenbahnverkehrsunternehmen / railway operation company) but a locomotive rental business where he lends his locomotive including engineer (himself) to EVUs.

But small EVUs exist(-ed), like Rail 4U / Barbara Pirch with her E 94 locomotive, which unfortunately had an accident.

[pxeger1]

Don’t you also need to negotiate timetable slots?

[johannes1234321]

Nowadays you can "negotiate" relatively easily ad hoc on a website these days. Assuming there is free capacity. On "bug" cargo routes that typically works few hours advanced.

https://www.dbinfrago.com/web/schienennetz/leistungen/trasse...

[gsnedders]

If there is capacity, they are obliged to provide it on a non-discriminatory basis. If there isn't capacity, then it gets into questions of allocation (which still needs to be done in a fair and documented basis).

[joelhaasnoot]

There's also a lot of other use cases! For example, if you have a train schedule with stations and times, you often aren't told how the train will navigate between those stations. In some countries it's straightforward but for instance SNCF TGV services in France sometimes go hours without stopping at a station, crossing a lot of distance. In that case a solution like this can help you find an educated best guess to show users on a map.

[paganel]

Reading your comment I also realized that something like this would also be quite useful in the eventuality of a grand war in Eastern Europe (let’s say) and of the sudden necessity that would arise at that point of sending big and heavy stuff (ordnance, tanks etc) by train from one part of the continent to the other. Even though I do hope that the European militaries already have this type of policies in place (and hopefully handling connections between several countries’ rail-systems).