All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)

kalleboo

Never seen this one before: "[Error] SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"

panny

It would be interesting to see a negative bar with station closures as well. And some way to zoom the map would be nice. As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those. Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....

_alternator_

Cool idea! Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization. I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?). Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.

decimalenough

Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_i...

chamomeal

Super cool but I did get this error while scrolling the timeline on safari/iOS Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading jivx.com (see the browser console for more information).

LurkandComment

That whole website is just beautiful. I'd love to see more work by the designer.

game_the0ry

Very cool. I am a sucker for good design and this site was beautiful to look at. I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why?

hyperific

On mobile pressing play makes the timeline go from 1872 to 2026 in a single step.

panick21_

Would be cool to somehow see how the volumes of passengers grows as well. I also want to see if we have this information for Switzerland.

cpa

Super cool! I did something similar (in terms of visualisation) a few years back, a map of cities by their birthdate on wikipedia: https://cpa.github.io/wiki-cities-birthdates/

psanchez

I love the fractal nature of it.

aanet

Tell-tale signs of AI-built UX: - Extremely low contrast typography - Serif typefaces with body in sans serif - Black + red/maroon color combo - tiny, tiny typefaces

echelon_musk

Stations , surely?!

Galus

So tired of all the AI picking this terrible font.

helterskelter

Fun bit of trivia: Japanese train stations each have their own custom stamp, and if you have a piece of paper or a notebook they'll stamp it for you at the ticket booth (this is a fairly common thing to do there). If you get an A5 notebook, it's a neat way to document a trip -- one stamp for your departure station, one for your arrival.

mulmen

I’m not sure what I am looking at. I see a number going up but the methodology is missing and analysis is lacking. Has Japan ever closed a railway station? Are the 1872 stations the first ever in Japan? Is this a plot of all stations ever constructed or just the ones that still exist? Has the number of stations ever gone down? What events are corollated with building booms and what direction does the arrow of causality point?

totetsu

Did they catch Perry's Miniature Train? https://repository.library.brown.edu/viewers/image/zoom/bdr:...

adamofeden

This is awesome! The website screams claude to me. I'm not bashing it, in fact I think it's great. That was just my first thought when I opened the webpage. Good transition into the learning tool as well.

aussieguy1234

At first glance I thought this was a photo gallery. Still interesting, although a photo gallery would have been more interesting, at least for me

akashwadhwani35

I made something similar, with sound - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo