Routes on real track
Also: route, line on the map, openstreetmap
Your journey is drawn along the actual rails, joined up from one timing point to the next.
Example
36 mi ≈
The ≈ means part of the route was a straight line.
A train’s schedule lists every timing point it passes, in order, including junctions it never stops at. Trainiac joins each pair of neighbours with a piece of track traced from OpenStreetMap, the free map the world draws together.
Chain those pieces up and you get the exact way the train went, which is also how Trainiac measures your distance.
Short-notice trains sometimes only list their stops. Then Trainiac finds the shortest way along the track between them. Where a gap still can’t be filled, it draws a straight line, and the distance gets a small ≈ to say it’s approximate.
In Trainiac
The map on every journey, and the distance under its times.