Rail planner for visiting multiple stations in one day
Problem
Train enthusiasts plan day trips to visit several stations in one day, but existing planners (TrainSplit, RealTimeTrains, Google Maps) cannot build itineraries with deliberate stopovers at intermediate stations to look around.
Opportunity
A niche trip planner that splits journeys across multiple trains with timed station-visit layovers, validating connections and fare-splitting — the 'multi-city flight search' for railfanning.
Market analysis
No dedicated station-visiting planner surfaced in search — the niche appears genuinely open, with enthusiasts stitching together TrainSplit (fare splitting), RealTimeTrains (live data with a public API) and rail forums manually. But it is open because it is tiny: a hobby community's trip-planning pain, solvable with a well-executed itinerary builder over existing open data.
Market · UK rail enthusiast community (railforums.co.uk and related subreddits); small, passionate, and already clustered around the data sources this tool would consume.
Pricing · Comparables: TrainSplit monetizes via ticketing margins, RealTime Trains via API subscriptions (£0-30/month tiers). Realistic ceiling is free with a tip jar or a few pounds per generated booking referral.
Pros
- + Niche appears genuinely unoccupied — no existing multi-station itinerary planner found.
- + UK rail data is unusually open (RealTimeTrains API, published fares and timetables), so the data layer is accessible.
- + Community is identifiable and reachable in a handful of forums.
Cons
- − Very small total addressable market — a UK trainspotting subculture.
- − Split-ticketing rules and connection validity are gnarly domain logic to get right.
- − TrainSplit can add stopover planning as a feature at any time.
- − Enthusiast tools are expected to be free; monetization is a rounding error.
Existing / similar tools
Source
r/Doesthisexist (Reddit)
The interesting engineering here is the constraint solver: given a list of stations to visit and a day, find a feasible sequence of services with layovers long enough to “look around” (a user-set dwell time) — that is genuinely absent from every UK planner, which optimize for speed, not tourism. It is also the kind of problem one strong developer solves in a month over published timetable and fares data, which cuts both ways: TrainSplit could ship it as a feature toggle. The realistic best case is a beloved free tool with a Patreon, and honestly, for a railfan-builder that might be the whole point — but it should be built as a labor of love, not a startup.