maqueta

A living model railway of Finland — every real train runs, late, in miniature.

maqueta-live.vercel.app

Finland rendered as a tabletop diorama: a birch baseboard, hand-painted meadow, and ~100 real trains running their real routes at their real lateness, right now. ICs glide between Helsinki and Oulu, commuters swarm the capital region, night trains crawl north in the dark — lit windows and all, because the sun over the layout is Finland's actual sun.

Click a train to see where it's going, how late it is, and what it's made of (real consists — restaurant cars, double-deckers, sleeper stock). Press the delay board to jump to the most troubled service on the network.

How it works

• Data — Fintraffic's Digitraffic API (train positions, timetables, compositions) plus Open-Meteo for weather. All keyless, all live.
• Worker — a Cloudflare Durable Object polls Digitraffic every ~15s while clients are connected (every 5min when idle), caches timetables in SQLite storage, and broadcasts one snapshot to all browsers over WebSocket.
• Layout — the railway itself is built at build time from the day's real timetable: scripts/build-network.mjs turns 1,600+ services into a graph of station-to-station "flex track" legs — exactly how a real model railway compresses geography. Terrain comes from Natural Earth.
• Engine — src/lib/engine.mjs projects each live GPS fix onto the train's route chain, then a little "mover" interpolates positions between polls and snaps on teleports (coupler change, GPS hop).
• Scene — one canvas, two layers: a cached baseboard (sea, sandy shore, meadows, forests, towns, track) and a live layer of oversized rolling stock, weather particles, and lamps. The squash + tilt-shift blur sell the tabletop.

Run it

npm install
npm run dev        # vite dev server
npm test           # engine test suite (~14k assertions)
npm run build      # production bundle in dist/
npm run worker     # deploy the Cloudflare worker (wrangler)

To rebuild the network or terrain data:

node scripts/build-network.mjs   # needs today's Digitraffic timetable dump
node scripts/build-terrain.mjs   # Natural Earth geojson

Stack

Vite + TypeScript + Canvas 2D · Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects · Digitraffic · Open-Meteo · Natural Earth

MIT © 2026 Miguel García