The World's
Rail Command
Centre.

TrainTrackings is an independent, advertising-supported information service built for the millions of passengers, commuters, planners and rail enthusiasts who want a clear, honest and instantly accessible picture of the world's railway networks. Where official operator websites stop at a single border, our index keeps going — across 150+ countries, six continents, 76 national operators and well over a thousand named stations. Whether you're catching the 06:24 from Reading to Paddington, planning a six-day Trans-Siberian odyssey from Moscow to Vladivostok, or simply curious which night train runs from Vienna to Rome on a Tuesday in late October, we exist to give you the answer in seconds — without making you create an account, accept a cookie wall, or pay a booking fee.

Our editorial mission is straightforward. We believe that rail travel is one of the most civilised, efficient and environmentally responsible ways to move people, and that good information is what unlocks it. Too often passengers are funnelled into commission-driven booking portals that obscure the real timetable, hide the cheapest fare class, or refuse to display sleeper-class options because they earn smaller margins. We do the opposite. We surface the official data, link you directly to the operator that runs the train, and let you decide. That principle — accuracy first, monetisation second — is what shapes every section of this site.

We were founded in 2024 by a small team of software engineers, data journalists and lifelong railway travellers who had all hit the same wall: there was no single, multilingual, mobile-first place on the open web to look up a train from Lahore to Karachi, then a Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka, then a TGV from Paris to Lyon, all in one consistent format. So we built one. Today TrainTrackings indexes 918+ rail services and 1,322+ stations, and the index grows every week as we onboard new GTFS feeds and partner with operators in regions historically poorly served by international travel tech — particularly South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caucasus and South America.

TrainTrackings does not sell tickets. We deliberately stay out of the booking funnel so that we never have a financial incentive to nudge you toward one operator or class over another. Instead, every search result links directly to the official booking page of the operator running the train. That is almost always the cheapest and most reliable place to buy. If a reseller is genuinely the only option (for example, a non-Cyrillic gateway to Russian Railways), we will say so explicitly.

Booking windows vary by network. Most European high-speed operators open sales 90 to 180 days in advance, and the earliest fares (often called "Prem's", "Sparpreis", "Super Economy" or "Advance") are non-refundable but a fraction of the walk-up price. Indian Railways opens its tatkal "same day" quota at 10:00 IST the day before travel; competition is fierce. Pakistan Railways uses a single national reservation system accessible at pakrailways.gov.pk and at every commercial station from 7am to 11pm.

The PNR (Passenger Name Record) is your unique reservation reference. In India and Pakistan it is a 10-digit number printed on your ticket; in Europe it is usually a six-character alphanumeric code. Your PNR lets you check status, request a refund, modify travel dates and download your e-ticket. Always photograph or screenshot your PNR — it is the single most important number on your ticket.

Refund rules vary, but a useful rule of thumb: 100% refund up to 48 hours before departure, 50% up to 12 hours, and nothing thereafter. Premium operators in Europe sell flexible "refundable" fares at a 50–80% premium, while South Asian operators apply a flat clerkage fee (around 5–10% of the fare). Always read the refund policy on the operator's site before paying — and screenshot it.

We ship improvements every week. Recent additions include full GTFS ingestion for Romania's CFR Călători and Bulgaria's BDŽ, live platform numbers for all UK National Rail stations, multilingual station names for Pakistan Railways (Urdu) and Indian Railways (Hindi, Tamil, Bengali), and a brand-new ticket price calculator that estimates the cheapest available fare for any journey in under 200 ms.

Coming next: live-tracking for Egyptian National Railways, a full overhaul of our night-train index with detailed sleeper-class diagrams, and a public API that lets developers query our normalised global schedule database with a single REST call. Sign up to the newsletter at the bottom of this page to be the first to know — we send roughly one email a month, never spam, and you can unsubscribe in one click.

Finally, a request: if you spot a mistake — a wrong departure, a missing station, an outdated fare — please tell us. Every report is read by a human, usually fixed within 24 hours, and the contributor gets a credit in our changelog. Rail information should be a public good, and we maintain it as one. Thank you for travelling with us.