Not trying to nitpick, but at least a tiny sliver of this data is misleading: the Amtrak stations markers include locations that are definitely not passenger rail stations. For example, the map shows a half-dozen dots on the southwest Washington state coast, but the only western Washington passenger rail service is up and down I-5, and then eastbound from there.

Hey there, I was involved in making these maps.

You're absolutely correct. We used point data from BTS (http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...), and did not filter out non-train station types.

We're fixing this now.

sachinag

In case you plan on updating these, I would love love love an overlay to add in state lines. For example, it appears that it would be technically possible to run a train from my hometown of Carbondale, IL to Saint Louis (blows my mind that it's not a thing) but putting in the overlay and being able to zoom and pretend make that route would be awesome.

sarcher

This can be prototyped pretty quickly using Leaflet to serve the zoom-able tile map and topojson to reduce the size of the overlay data (in this case, train tracks and stations). I haven't tried topojson for a map of the lower 48, but I was getting a 80% reduction in data file size when using it on parcel data. This way, instead of rolling your own tile layer with the data which is a little bit of an involved process, you can just load a topojson file with the data and draw it as a vector layer.

I'm sure there are limitations that make this much more difficult than I'm expressing due to the volume of traffic that hits washingtonpost.com - I'm more remarking on this so if other people are looking to do data visualizations like this they know there is a good dynamic option out there they can try.

http://leafletjs.com/ https://github.com/topojson/topojson