About Cabrides.eu

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 plan interactive routes all over Europe (and some day hopefully the world) by connecting different cabrides. For that purpose not only the videos are added, but also the exact route that the train travels and all the stations it passes along the way.

When a new cabride is added, this is the current procedure:

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 image has to be of sufficient enough quality. Full HD or above is preferred. Lower quality video can be used if there is simply not a better alternative available (as long as the route is unique and interesting enough).
• There should be no background music or a completely muted audio track. (The audio can be muted in some places as many train drivers use this method to not share conversations with the controller of other people on the train.)
• We also try to establish if the video is likely to stay online for a prolonged period of time.
• If this all looks (and sounds) good, the route can be added.
2. Now 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 that the train passes through.

This process is unfortunately pretty time consuming. It is impossible to automate, especially because we try to achieve a high degree of detail. 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.