[druskacik]

European night trains search engine. The plan is not to provide the functionality where user searches for a specific route on a specific date and the engine returns prices. The plan is to provide "tips for trips", e.g. I provide a starting city and it will recommend me interesting trip ideas any time in the future. There are many flight apps that provide this functionality, but no train app.

Currently I'm building scrapers for all relevant provider, then I want to connect the data for multi-city trips recommendation. Plus some connection to the day trains so that the trips are built more easily.

Some existing trip recommendations:

Prague <-> Amsterdam https://trainbot.eu/?from=prague&to=amsterdam&type=return

Berlin <-> Paris https://trainbot.eu/?from=berlin&to=paris&type=return

Zurich <-> Budapest https://trainbot.eu/?from=zurich&to=budapest&type=return

[jll29]

Now you if you wanted to visit the best city in the world (Edinburgh), you could of course take the Caledonian Sleeper night train from London up to the Scottish capital; but then you would completely miss out on the beautiful views of the country and the sea.

This case perhaps merits a hard-wired message "for this trip, we recommend a day train, or we'd regret you'd miss the panoramic views".

[madman_dev]

This is awesome, I would list it on https://only-eu.eu , if that's ok for you?

[druskacik]

Sure :) Thanks.

[madman_dev]

Of course, thanks for building stuff like this!

Already listed it! If you want something changed just reach out over the contact form on the site.

Cheers

[medvidek]

For some reason Prague -> Bratislava trips are only shown with departures at 00:36 even though there are several through cars that leave Prague at 21:58 (and join the rest of the listed NightJet in Breclav), which is much more comfortable for your average traveler. Ceske drahy website has both connections, so maybe you aren't scraping it yet?

[druskacik]

Hm, thanks for the tip, I didn't know that. I scrape NightJet website, which lists only the 00:36 train. I'll look into it.

[mdibiase]

Would be nice to add Milan as a destination. I currently do not see it listed in the cities available.

[druskacik]

I have a working version of Trenitalia scraper (Intercity Notte trains across Italy), I just haven't added the routes to UI before verifying it works reliably. Hopefully I'll add it in the evening.

Also the Milan - Brusells route from European Sleeper, it's scraped but not yet in UI. I'll reply here when it's done.

[druskacik]

Added, but just the Milan - Brusells route from European Sleeper so far.

https://trainbot.eu/?from=milan&to=brussels&type=return

The 20€ Milan - Zurich tickets also don't look bad, but the early-morning departure / evening arrival are probably not that optimal.

https://trainbot.eu/?from=milan&to=zurich&type=return&seat_t...

EDIT: note, this route will be available from September.

[mdibiase]

Thanks! Appreciate the quick turnaround

[jo-m]

cough that name is already in use ;) https://github.com/jo-m/trainbot

[druskacik]

sorry about that :)

[jo-m]

no worries, it is mostly unmaintaned now.

[outside1234]

Thank you for building this! I might be holding it wrong, but I would like to be able to search for all night trains from a particular origin. Is that possible?

[druskacik]

Currently not possible, but:

- once you fill the "From" field with your start city, the "To" field will include only cities reachable from the "From" city

- at https://trainbot.eu/coverage/ you can search for all routes that go through your city

I plan to add a subpage for every relevant city with recommended routes once I'll have enough data. Something like https://www.seat61.com/ but with actual prices and dates.

[chaghalibaghali]

I love this idea, it’s always surprisingly difficult to find what routes are available, what cabins they have, how much tickets are etc.

[mb2100]

Sounds similar to https://nightride.com ?

[druskacik]

It's definitely similar, but the philosophy seems different. NightRide supports exactly the use case on searching a route on a specific date. I also noticed that if they don't have the price pre-scraped, a scrape is called dynamically on user's request.

My idea is to pre-scrape the prices and answer questions such as: wanna go to Amsterdam for a weekend? -> here are the best dates and prices.

[XCSme]

I am not sure if it works correctly, I can't search for Brussles <-> Amsterdam

[XCSme]

Oh, it's only for night trains (?)

[druskacik]

Yeah, the focus is mostly on night trains, although some day combinations leak to the data, so it's possible you'll find some combinations for daily trains.

Of course, I'd like to have the daily trains in the data, but that would drastically increase the number of combinations and require some more scaling of the scraping, which I don't want to do at this point. Focusing on night trains only is a nice niche.

I plan to add at least some daily trains between core cities, e.g. the EuroStar London <-> Paris route, which would make multi-leg search to farther cities easier (i.e. combination of night train + daily train).

[nerdomancer]

Brilliant idea! Please keep on building.

[karlosvomacka]

530 eur for return train from Prague to Frankfurt? I guess the reason why there aren't any train apps is that traveling by train seems useless at these prices... :(

[druskacik]

That's the Prague - Zurich NightJet that's hellishly expensive, possibly because the target audience are Swiss people for whom it's not so much :D Also, NightJet does not price very dynamically as opposed to other providers, and their baseline price is always quite high.

But yes, in most cases this journey will be more expensive that an alternative flight, which is a shame. However, there are routes where it's comparable, e.g. the Prague - Amsterdam route.