About this website

Watching cabride videos on websites such as YouTube is a fun and relaxing passtime. It allows you to see almost the whole world from the front of a train whenever you feel like. Many wonderful train drivers nowadays film their trips across their respective countries and delight many people around the world with crisp and clear images.

We too enjoy watching these videos and because we have also always had a keen interest in maps, plotting, routes and geography as a whole, we decided we would try to add as many interesting cabride videos to an interactive map that we possibly could. This would not only give a far better picture of the places that a certain train ride visits, but also allows you to plot routes all over Europe (and some day hopefully the world) by connecting different cabrides. So we not only add videos, but also the exact routes (even the precies train tracks) that the train travels and any stations it passes.

When we add a new cab ride, this is mostly how we go about it:

1. We find the video as suggested by one of our users or select one that caught our own attention. We rate that video on a number of criteria:
• The video has to be of sufficient enough quality. We aim for HD quality at the very least, although we allow ourselves to deviate from it if the route or video is very unique or otherwise of special to our users.
• There should be no background music or a fully muted audio track. (The audio can be muted in some places as many train drivers use this method to obscure communication with colleagues.)
• We also try to establish if the video is likely to stay online for a prolonged period of time.
2. The route of the ride is plotted onto a map, following the exact train tracks whenever possible.
3. Every station that the train passes is added to the ride, including a timestamp in the video for easy navigation during playback.
4. As a final step some more details of the route are added, such as the type of train ride (freight, passenger, etc) and the countries it passes through.

This process is unfortunately pretty time consuming. It is impossible to automate, especially because we try to achieve a very high degree of realism. Adding a new cabride to the website takes roughly 15 to 30 minutes per every hour of video footage depending on the type of cabride.