The project
Japan Rail Atlas is two things at once: a live, timetable-based map of trains moving across Japan's rail network, and an encyclopedia of the lines, trains, operators, and rolling stock behind them. This page explains how both are built, and why a given train is, or isn't, on the map right now.
Japan Rail Atlas was formerly Japan Trains Live — same map, same data, new name. Links to japantrainslive.com redirect here automatically.
The moving dots aren't a GPS feed. Every train is placed by following its published timetable: we work out where each train should be right now (which two stations it's between, at the current time in Japan) and show it on the track between them. Delays, cancellations and diversions are not reflected.
A train appears only while it is scheduled to be running. It joins the map when its departure time arrives and leaves once it completes its final stop. Because the clock runs in real Japan time, the active-train count rises and falls through the day: busiest at the morning and evening peaks, nearly empty overnight.
A line shows track but no trains when we don't yet have a timetable for it; coverage varies by line and grows as more operators' schedules are added. You can also hide whole categories (Shinkansen, metro, regional, local) from the Trains panel, in which case those trains simply aren't drawn.
Every train's card carries a small badge naming where its schedule comes from:
the train follows an official published timetable (a railway operator's own website or timetable, or an operator-published open-data feed).
Shinkansen and other timetabled services (like this N700S on the Tōkaidō Shinkansen) are shown on the map using published schedules.
ScheduledOpen any train's card to see the specific source named in full. The position is always an estimate from that schedule, never a report of where the train actually is.
Train schedules: official timetables published by the railway operators themselves (the JR companies, the major private railways, and municipal subways), plus operator-published open-data feeds where available. A line whose timetable we don't yet have shows track but no trains.
The rail network: every line's shape and every station's location come from Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (国土交通省) National Land Numerical Information, and from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database Licence).
The base map and terrain: Google Maps, with terrain imagery credited to NASA.
The articles: line histories and rolling-stock, operator, and named-service profiles are written from the English and Japanese Wikipedia and Wikidata, and each article lists its sources. Article text is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0, the same licence as the Wikipedia material it draws on (see the Terms of use).
The photographs: from Wikimedia Commons. Every image is freely licensed (public domain or Creative Commons) and credited on the page to its photographer and licence.
We follow one simple rule, cite-or-skip: if a fact can't be traced to a source, we leave it out rather than guess. Every photo is checked to make sure it really shows what it says (and that it's free to use) before it goes up. And a train position is always presented as what its timetable implies, never as a live observation.
For the encyclopedia articles, we read both the English and Japanese Wikipedia pages on each subject and combine what they cover. The two versions often differ (and for Japanese railways the Japanese page is frequently the more detailed of the two), so drawing on both gives a fuller, more accurate account than either alone.
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