World Rail Networks

The visualisation uses globe.gl, a Three.js-based globe library. The globe is textured with a NASA night Earth image and topology bump map, set against a star-field background. Auto-rotation starts at 0.15 rpm, centred over Europe and Asia (lat 30°, lng 60°, altitude 2.0). The atmosphere is rendered in blue (#1a3fff) at 14% altitude. Damped OrbitControls allow smooth user interaction — spinning pauses automatically when a country is clicked.

Each railway corridor is rendered as a globe.gl arc drawn from the first to the last waypoint of its path. Arc colour is type-coded: HSR red (#ff3c3c, stroke 0.5), conventional blue (#64b4ff, stroke 0.35), freight brown, metro green, and planned purple (stroke 0.25). Planned lines use arcDashLength/arcDashGap with a 2500ms animate time to produce a travelling-dash effect. arcAltitudeAutoScale 0.3 gives every arc a gentle geodesic bulge proportional to its distance.

The 30 largest railway stations are rendered as globe.gl points. pointRadius scales with √(annual passengers in millions) × 0.02, so Shinjuku (770M/year) and Tokyo Station (462M/year) appear much larger than smaller hubs. Colour interpolates from cyan for lower-traffic stations to red-tinted for the busiest, using the same gradient as the original deck.gl ScatterplotLayer. Hovering a hub shows a tooltip; clicking populates the bottom-right detail panel.

Country borders are loaded from /countries-110m.geojson and applied via polygonsData at altitude 0.005. Border stroke colour transitions from faint white (rgba 18%) on hover to 60% white, and to vivid yellow (#fde725) when a country is selected. The polygon cap is fully transparent by default with a subtle yellow or white fill for hovered/selected states. Clicking a country triggers a smooth fly-to animation (pointOfView transition over 800ms) and opens a country stats panel.

When a country is selected, a panel in the bottom-right corner lists all rail lines whose country field matches the selected country. Each line shows its type colour dot, name, and length. A summary row shows total tracked kilometres and hub count for the country. The panel dismisses on the close button or by re-clicking the same country polygon on the globe.

Bottom-left filter buttons toggle the active rail type (All / High-Speed / Conventional / Planned / Freight / Metro), immediately updating the arcsData subset. Clicking a rail arc or hub point opens the bottom-right detail panel with metadata: name, operator, length, top speed, opening year for lines; or station name, city, annual passengers for hubs. A top-right leaderboard ranks countries by total HSR kilometres with animated percentage bars. The Pause/Spin button toggles globe auto-rotation.