The main East Japan Railway Company (JR East) station and the directly adjacent private railways have a total of 35 platforms, an underground arcade, above-ground arcade and numerous hallways with another 17 platforms (52 total) that can be accessed through hallways to five directly connected stations without surfacing outside. The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.
Throwing in Japan into random topics in trains feel somewhat unfair. Most train fact sheets fail to include most Asian nations except Japan, often missing even Korea and Taiwan.
Commuter trains in many East/Southeast Asian cities like Shanghai has developed to levels comparable to Tokyo. Trains in some Central Asian cities such as Mumbai were also always notorious for congestions. I think those should also be considered more often and at greater depths, Fermi estimated if need be, than we would be just keep dropping random Shinjuku facts left and right.
We have stats for India, and they're no match: Kolkata Howrah gets about 1M pax per day, Mumbai CST around 670k. Nothing to sneeze at, but still several million (!) less than Shinjuku.
China has numerous airport-sized stations that handle huge volumes of long-distance passengers, but I'm not aware of any single commuter hub remotely the size of Shinjuku. Partly this is because of the economic system: Chinese trains are all state-run and centralized, while a large part of why Shinjuku is so busy is that it's a hub for numerous private railways as well.
Is India considered central Asia? I've always seen it referred to as south Asia, and former Soviet countries like Kazakhstan have been referred to as central Asia. I think India is east of these "central Asian" countries. Perhaps this is all a bit of pedantry.
I’m really impressed at how usable that visualisation is on mobile. It’s also really great aesthetically. Japanese artists can still do the best sci fi designs about
If only 1% give money to homeless people, that’s… a good place to beg for money. I would probably make more there than what i make at my fancy software engineering job (100K before taxes per year):
- 36000 people
- let’s say each give 10 cents ($)
- that’s $3600 per day
- if you beg 8h per day, that’s $1200/day
- begging mon to fri means $24000 per month (tax free)
With 28800s in 8 hours that's more than 1 donation per second during these 8 hours. Also you now have 36000 10ct coins, that's more than 100kg in coins to move every day
very unrealistic because many train riders don't carry coins, nor will use a contactless payment to pay a random begger, even if they see them on the platform every day.
This is amazing, seems really detailed and leveraging official sources too, nice job!
Since the author seems to be Catalan, I'll shamelessly plug a Metro-station-relevant event that is ongoing right now in Barcelona:
There are many "ghost" metro stations in Barcelona that been popular (at least used to) urban exploring destinations. Two of those, Gaudí and Correus, are now opening to the public via tours, if you register at https://obrimelmetro.cat
I've only visited Gaudí in a unofficial capacity like a decade ago, and haven't yet done the new tours myself so can't vouch how interesting they are, but seems there are only 5000 open spots in total. It seems like one of the tours is even during the night, so you get as close to the urban exploring experience as possible without having to run across active train tracks :)
The ones in Zürich are not actually metro stations. They where built to be, but then the city voted against a metro. The stations that were already built were converted into tram stations. There where some complications like that fact the the tram is almost too tall to fit. The pantograph is almost fully compressed when the tram enters the tunnel.
The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.
Zurich does pretty well with light rail, trams and buses. Public transport is very good there. Two more reasons are that the city isn't that big, so you're in easy walking distance of some sort of connection, and the terrain isn't ideal. A good chunk of the population live up steep hills which are well-served by the tram system. The airport is also very well-connected by bus/tram/rail, and only 10-15 minutes to the centre.
That said, I would have loved to see HBf on this website.
i remember visiting zurich once and standing at a light rail station when the next train was one minute overdue and all the people waiting were looking at their watches in total disbelief and consternation. warms my sla-minded heart :)
It's between the underground tracks of Bahnhof Löwenstrasse and the above ground: [1]
There are a lot of little neat things. For example the elevators go sideways [2] because the platform in the underground Bahnhof is wider (this is due to safety regulations etc.) [3]
BTW, what is marked as Stadttunnel in [1] is the new bike tunnel [4] which has actually been there for many years as it was supposed to be a highway tunnel but was never opened (built many, many years ago).
Costs, existing infrastructure and alternatives (S-Bahn was extended) and fears that the local businesses above would loose foot traffic if people are no longer traveling above ground with the trams.
I really like urban places with public transport on the street. It leads to less cars and more pedestrian friendly streets.
Also I think for small distances (Zürich is not that big), I rather ride a bit longer with the tram than going down to a deep metro station, especially in hilly places.
Because talk radio stations of your city are funded by ads for local car dealers and the show hosts constantly dump on public transportation projects. For example, Quebec City.
I don’t think that’s the causal relationship. Even if the stakeholders were purely the listeners: radios are in cars. Basically all the radio listeners aren’t just drivers they are driving.
A set of crossovers has a high upfront cost, but compare to the added seating capacity on every tram car every day for decades and it doesn't seem so bad.
Buses also have the doors only on one side usually, if you're just running trams on the surface in traffic you'll probably only need them on the pavement side of the vehicle. It's just got weird in this case the assumption the choice was made on changed after they already had a fleet.
Feels like you're limiting your options quite significantly, though. It's not just underground; elevated trams will often have island stops, and even street-level ones do sometimes.
Same in Gothenburg. There's a single underground station, with the platform in the middle, so the trams need to cross over. Another underground station is planned, but it will have the tracks in the middle instead.
This guy has spent the last 10 years drawing about 2,547 stations around the world and making 3D models available to everyone. This might be the most amazing thing I have ever seen on the internet. Kudos.
One minor nitpick: zooming the map is very slow (maybe Leaflet is not the best choice?). And the main station in Paris is missing: Châtelet-Les Halles.
Leaflet should easily handle stuff like this if configured correctly. OP just slaps 3000 markers in a single layer, and each of them is an image element in dom. Should probably use some marker clustering for that.
Very impressive work.
Was very saddened to see how Ukrainian Kyiv and Kharkiv stations were excluded. We have deep stations (like Arsenal'na at 105m that connects directly to the above-ground Dnipro station on a river bank), we have both Soviet-made and new stations. Also now they are doubly essential being used for both transportation and shelter during air raids by millions.
Reading comments like yours makes me wonder what kind of mental model of the world some people are working with. Russia does not need HN comments to tell them where train stations are.
It’s highly likely that Russia already has detailed models of every stations in Ukraine. If they didn’t before the war, they do now. Mapping public infrastructure doesn’t require a lot of spying.
But you have to understand that information control during war requires a shift of mindset. It’s better to start controlling everything which could be used by the enemy even if they probably already have it than try to establish complex rules. It gives good habits to people.
Of course they know where the stations are. But they don’t necessarily know the precise local of all the underground tunnels, exits, mechanical rooms, equipment, etc. The underground network is far more complex than what the consumer map hanging on the wall in the station shows.
During the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves.
Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.
I'd like to remind you that Russia is not the USSR. Surely the technology has significantly improved since, but some capabilities are definitely lost. One example is them not being able to build more strategic bombers.
This is why agencies don’t published detailed plans (only schematics) of train stations and airports. I learned this when working on a project for the New York subway in the early 2000s.
A very cool project, and a great resource for people with reduced mobility - I semi-regularly use Transport for London's station drawings (linked on this website) over the official accessibility map, which doesn't differentiate between stairs and escalators for example.
I also learned something, which I'd always wondered cynically but never thought to investigate. The walking connection between lines at some stations in Barcelona seems so long as to not make sense, but it's explained here that at the time the different lines and stations were dug and extended independently by different companies.
> Among the reasons for having such long corridors [in Barcelona] is the lack of planning or the vision of the metro network as a bunch of individual lines. As an example: line 1 and line 4 were extended to Urquinaona in 1932, but both lines were not connected until 1972, as they were originally operated by different companies.
In London that’s also mostly true due to the patchwork history of different companies building different lines… however when King’s Cross/St Pancras was redeveloped a few years ago the “official” interchange route between Piccadilly and Victoria lines became much, much longer - minutes of walking compared to seconds. This site doesn’t cover that station, but does link to TfL’s own diagrams via IanVisits, and the reason is clear: at one end the platforms of both lines are almost touching - and I believe that shortcut staircase is still there if you ignore the signs and know where to find it - but the tourist friendly route is much more circuitous, going up to the mainline station and back again. I assume it helps to relieve congestion in an extremely busy station, I remember more than one occasion when they just have to close entry to the platforms during rush hour due to overcrowding.
This is pretty shockingly detailed. I zoomed into my city of Cologne germany thinking there'd be nothing showed here since we don't have a 'real' metro but rather a Stadtbahn system that's partially separate from the street grid and partially on the streets.
Turns out they had excellent descriptions, models and info of all of our stations.
"Worst of all, the air was full of fumes; breathing was painful and difficult, and a dizziness came on them, so that they staggered and often fell. And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on."
The issue with Châtelet - aside from how crowded it is - is that it’s two stations masquerading as one, same as Montparnasse-Bienvenüe.
Once you know what’s on which side and that the directions in the main hall are purposefully made to have you meander for flow control and you can just cut through, it gets a lot more manageable.
If you want to see a ridiculous amount of escalators, take a look at the Collblanc station in Barcelona. It takes 6 escalators to transfer between the L5 and L9S lines.
Pretty impressive! Interesting shoutout to Längenfeldgasse (Vienna) for the cross-platform interchange. This is a pretty popular station to get to Schönbrunn Palace & Zoo, as such the majority of people changing stay on the platform and you really physically see the lean design in motion. This can probably only be done during the design phase otherwise to costly to ever change if it's even possible.
And they are almost all drawn “manually”! I am SO impressed by the dedication
> For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 2,547 stations
> A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station
> Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s
I was never able to build mental model of Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Most of the times was simply following the signs and yup, the layout is complicated.
There is an article in ElPais from 2020 about the author, Albert Guillaumes, and his creative process. Very interesting read! (texts are in Spanish though)
I’d like to add an interesting metric: density of subway/metro stations as measured by number of stations per square kilometer.
In European cities,
City,
Metro System,
Stations,
City Area (km²),
Density (stations/km²):
1. Paris,
Metro de Paris,
244,
105,
2.32
2. Berlin,
U‑Bahn only,
173,
892,
~0.19
3. London
Underground (London Tube),
~270,
1,572,
~0.17
4. Madrid,
Metro de Madrid,
~300,
605,
~0.50
Paris takes the lead, not just in Europe but globally, with ≈2.32 stations/km². Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris. Berlin (U‑Bahn only) and London have much lower densities (~0.17–0.19). Rome’s iconic metro is relatively sparse in terms of station density compared to other major European and Asian cities.
Here’s how European and Asian cities stack:
1. Paris (~2.32 stations/km²)
2. Seoul (~1.27)
3. Madrid (~0.50)
4. Tokyo (~0.46)
5. London (~0.17)
6. Berlin (~0.19)
7. Hong Kong (~0.09)
8. Shanghai (~0.06)
9. Rome (~0.057)
Seoul is highest among major Asian metro systems in terms of station concentration, making it the city in Asia with the densest metro network per square kilometer. Seoul has 768 stations in its metropolitan subway system spread across the city proper area of 605 km². By comparison, Tokyo’s combined metro (Tokyo Metro + Toei) has around 286 stations over ~621 km, giving a density of about 0.46 stations/km². Beijing has 523 stations but the city covers about 16,411 km²—yielding a much lower density (~0.03 stations/km²). Shanghai’s figure fluctuates due to rapid expansions: 409 unique stations from early 2025 data.
In addition to density, another interesting metric is
the number of street-level entrances (exit/entry points). Counting just stations ignores how many access points are available to the public. More entrances = better coverage, shorter walking distances, improved accessibility, especially in dense urban zones. Examples from Paris are:
Saint‑Lazare station (Lines 3, 12, 13, 14) has 11 entrances. Hotel de Ville (Lines 1 & 11) has 7 entrances. Madeleine station (Lines 8, 12, 14) has 5 accesses with 7 separate entrances. Alesia station (Line 4) has 6 entrances. Opera station (Lines 3,7,8) has 3 main entrances.
On average, Paris Metro stations have approximately 3–6 street-level entrances, with major hubs having 7–11. Paris doesn’t just have many stations, it maximizes them with multiple entry points, making its system exceptionally accessible over its territory.
Seoul also scores similar in accessibility due to its exit-rich stations, especially in dense areas. Other major metros (Tokyo, Madrid, London) lag when entry points are factored in.
I did not include US cities but I believe New York City might be notable.
> [...] Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris.
As a native of Madrid, I must point out that using the nominal surface area of the municipality of Madrid (~605 km²) is misleading for these purposes due to the Monte del Pardo [0] and Soto de Viñuelas [1], two fenced off forest areas covering around 180 km² between them. The impact of these areas on the nominal surface area of the city is visually obvious when you compare the outlines of Madrid and Paris administrative areas:
As a result, the relevant surface for estimating the density of Metro stations in Madrid should be at most ~425 km². While one may arguably also want to exclude the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes from the surface area of Paris, even the "de-Pardo'd" surface area of Madrid still contains significant non-urban areas such as the Casa de Campo forest, large non-built-up areas, and even most of its airport.
(In any case though, after this pedantic "well ackshually", I must also point out that a few Madrid Metro stations actually fall outside of its municipal limits. I would get out more, but I live in a town without a Metro)
Is Paris 6 times smaller than Madrid and 15 times smaller than London? Seems suspicious to me. What exactly is the boundary of this "area" and how does it relate to the subway network?
A significant proportion of the administrative area of Madrid is covered by fenced-off forests. Plus it covers other swathes of non-developed land and even most of its airport. The administrative area of Paris proper, on the other hand, is fully urbanised. See here for comparison:
London is a whole different animal. While Madrid and Paris are arguably "similar" cities in terms of urban design and residential density, London and UK cities in general are completely different.
The page footnote says that all sketches were hand drawn by the author over a 10 year period, and digitized during COVID by the power of extreme boredom.
I just had a quick look at a metro station I know, Sèvres Babylone in Paris, and it seems like there's a mistake in the model, adding a corridor that doesn't exist in the actual station.
Love this project. Back in my transit blogging days, one of the themes was short and long transfers. And here this idea immediately starts surfacing just looking at the stations - the crazy mazes with long tunnels are cool to explore on paper, but suck for actual transfers. It adds slogs in the middle of the trips, and kind of discourages transit use because trips seem longer and more work.
When scrolling down, the author actually includes a long discussion on the best possible transfer layouts! Many of the terrible stations over time are of course historically grown, evolved over time, and weren't the result of some maniac evil genius deciding to create miserable transfers. Systems are built sometimes over a hundred years, so a later station is added mostly where it can fit, not a as a result of some master plan.
But there's also ways to deal with these issues, which can be found in Berlin.
1) for the recently opened "Unter den linden" station, which is a transfer between a new extension (u5) and a 100-year-old line (u6), a station on the old line was actually moved by 180m so that the transfer would be good. (That is, the old station was closed and a new station built a bit a distance away)
2) in general in Berlin, especially after WWII, a lot of the subway construction followed a very long term master plan (to the extend that West Berlin actually planned a network for all of Berlin, even though the East was in another country behind the iron curtain). When stations were built, the planners "knew" it would be a transfer some day, so they added in accomodations ("Bauvorleistung" or preparations ahead of actual construction), often whole station shells for the future line it would connect to. This resulted in a lot of short transfers even when lines were built decades apart. And it also resulted in a bunch of ghost stations, which have yet to be connected to lines.
Perhaps it doesn't work on my browser, but all I see are low fidelity, wireframe/stick 3D model projections rendered as 2D images without much detail that could be made in a few minutes.
As the title suggests it is not a website of models of European metro stations because:
(a) it contains models of North American stations, and
(b) it does not contain stations from the St Petersburg[1] or Moscow metros which are significant European metros (the Moscow metro[2] is the longest in Europe)
Here's a zoomable 3D model of the world's busiest train station, Shinjuku in Tokyo:
https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/
3.6 million passengers per day. Wikipedia:
The main East Japan Railway Company (JR East) station and the directly adjacent private railways have a total of 35 platforms, an underground arcade, above-ground arcade and numerous hallways with another 17 platforms (52 total) that can be accessed through hallways to five directly connected stations without surfacing outside. The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.
Throwing in Japan into random topics in trains feel somewhat unfair. Most train fact sheets fail to include most Asian nations except Japan, often missing even Korea and Taiwan.
Commuter trains in many East/Southeast Asian cities like Shanghai has developed to levels comparable to Tokyo. Trains in some Central Asian cities such as Mumbai were also always notorious for congestions. I think those should also be considered more often and at greater depths, Fermi estimated if need be, than we would be just keep dropping random Shinjuku facts left and right.
We have stats for India, and they're no match: Kolkata Howrah gets about 1M pax per day, Mumbai CST around 670k. Nothing to sneeze at, but still several million (!) less than Shinjuku.
China has numerous airport-sized stations that handle huge volumes of long-distance passengers, but I'm not aware of any single commuter hub remotely the size of Shinjuku. Partly this is because of the economic system: Chinese trains are all state-run and centralized, while a large part of why Shinjuku is so busy is that it's a hub for numerous private railways as well.
Is India considered central Asia? I've always seen it referred to as south Asia, and former Soviet countries like Kazakhstan have been referred to as central Asia. I think India is east of these "central Asian" countries. Perhaps this is all a bit of pedantry.
I was mistaken, I meant to say South Asia. Central was more like north of India/China...
Ah, I see. I was curious since I guess you can refer to it as central Asia since it's west of east Asia, haha.
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I’m really impressed at how usable that visualisation is on mobile. It’s also really great aesthetically. Japanese artists can still do the best sci fi designs about
Yeah that makes Exit 8 looks like Child's play
Saint-Lazare being the most complex one that I saw personally (got lost, I mean)
3.6m is crazy. That must be a decent % of the entire Tokyo pop.
If only 1% give money to homeless people, that’s… a good place to beg for money. I would probably make more there than what i make at my fancy software engineering job (100K before taxes per year):
- 36000 people
- let’s say each give 10 cents ($)
- that’s $3600 per day
- if you beg 8h per day, that’s $1200/day
- begging mon to fri means $24000 per month (tax free)
With 28800s in 8 hours that's more than 1 donation per second during these 8 hours. Also you now have 36000 10ct coins, that's more than 100kg in coins to move every day
This assumes there is a central entrance you can situate yourself as a beggar.
In reality there are probably 10+ entrances.
> The entire above/underground complex has well over 200 exits.
very unrealistic because many train riders don't carry coins, nor will use a contactless payment to pay a random begger, even if they see them on the platform every day.
Begging is illegal in Japan.
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This is hilarious, thank you
This is amazing, seems really detailed and leveraging official sources too, nice job!
Since the author seems to be Catalan, I'll shamelessly plug a Metro-station-relevant event that is ongoing right now in Barcelona:
There are many "ghost" metro stations in Barcelona that been popular (at least used to) urban exploring destinations. Two of those, Gaudí and Correus, are now opening to the public via tours, if you register at https://obrimelmetro.cat
I've only visited Gaudí in a unofficial capacity like a decade ago, and haven't yet done the new tours myself so can't vouch how interesting they are, but seems there are only 5000 open spots in total. It seems like one of the tours is even during the night, so you get as close to the urban exploring experience as possible without having to run across active train tracks :)
Thanks for sharing. London has these permanently, and while not cheap, they're very much worth it too.
Wow, very nice project.
The ones in Zürich are not actually metro stations. They where built to be, but then the city voted against a metro. The stations that were already built were converted into tram stations. There where some complications like that fact the the tram is almost too tall to fit. The pantograph is almost fully compressed when the tram enters the tunnel.
The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.
[1] https://cdn.dreso.com/fileadmin/_processed_/0/3/csm_Tierspit...
[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramtunnel_Milchbuck%E2%80%93S... [DE]
EDIT: spelling
I think you meant a pantograph instead of a photograph ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph_(transport)
Yes, it got autocorrected. Thanks
I'd love to know why you'd vote against having a metro.
Zurich does pretty well with light rail, trams and buses. Public transport is very good there. Two more reasons are that the city isn't that big, so you're in easy walking distance of some sort of connection, and the terrain isn't ideal. A good chunk of the population live up steep hills which are well-served by the tram system. The airport is also very well-connected by bus/tram/rail, and only 10-15 minutes to the centre.
That said, I would have loved to see HBf on this website.
i remember visiting zurich once and standing at a light rail station when the next train was one minute overdue and all the people waiting were looking at their watches in total disbelief and consternation. warms my sla-minded heart :)
One of the most mind blowing things for me was seeing that river Sihl flows through Hbf between the tracks.
To be precise it flows above (and under) the tracks, as in, perpendicular, not "in between" parallel tracks.
BTW Hbf is a München thing, we call our beloved Zürich Hauptbahnhof just HB :-)
Can you explain where? Which tracks?
I have seen this comment on Reddit a few months ago, and some people were talking about it. They came to the conclusion that you cannot see the Sihl.
It's between the underground tracks of Bahnhof Löwenstrasse and the above ground: [1]
There are a lot of little neat things. For example the elevators go sideways [2] because the platform in the underground Bahnhof is wider (this is due to safety regulations etc.) [3]
BTW, what is marked as Stadttunnel in [1] is the new bike tunnel [4] which has actually been there for many years as it was supposed to be a highway tunnel but was never opened (built many, many years ago).
[1] https://img.nzz.ch/2014/05/30/1.18312867.1401474596.jpg
[2] https://www.standseilbahnen.ch/images/8000/8000.06-zuerich-h...
[3] https://implenia.com/fileadmin/implenia.com/referenzen/durch...
[4] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/web/de/mobilitaet/v...
Costs, existing infrastructure and alternatives (S-Bahn was extended) and fears that the local businesses above would loose foot traffic if people are no longer traveling above ground with the trams.
I really like urban places with public transport on the street. It leads to less cars and more pedestrian friendly streets. Also I think for small distances (Zürich is not that big), I rather ride a bit longer with the tram than going down to a deep metro station, especially in hilly places.
with sufficient density and priority on roads, a tram network might be better, other than having to wait outside in bad weather
The public transport coverage especially with tram in Zürich is already amazing
Because talk radio stations of your city are funded by ads for local car dealers and the show hosts constantly dump on public transportation projects. For example, Quebec City.
I don’t think that’s the causal relationship. Even if the stakeholders were purely the listeners: radios are in cars. Basically all the radio listeners aren’t just drivers they are driving.
Huh, I wondered why Tierspital station is so strange. TIL!
> The trams also switch to the left side as the doors are only one side.
... Wait, what? That seems like a serious false economy...
A set of crossovers has a high upfront cost, but compare to the added seating capacity on every tram car every day for decades and it doesn't seem so bad.
Buses also have the doors only on one side usually, if you're just running trams on the surface in traffic you'll probably only need them on the pavement side of the vehicle. It's just got weird in this case the assumption the choice was made on changed after they already had a fleet.
Feels like you're limiting your options quite significantly, though. It's not just underground; elevated trams will often have island stops, and even street-level ones do sometimes.
Same in Gothenburg. There's a single underground station, with the platform in the middle, so the trams need to cross over. Another underground station is planned, but it will have the tracks in the middle instead.
This guy has spent the last 10 years drawing about 2,547 stations around the world and making 3D models available to everyone. This might be the most amazing thing I have ever seen on the internet. Kudos.
This is insane. Never saw anything like it.
One minor nitpick: zooming the map is very slow (maybe Leaflet is not the best choice?). And the main station in Paris is missing: Châtelet-Les Halles.
Other than that, incredible work!! Amazing.
Leaflet should easily handle stuff like this if configured correctly. OP just slaps 3000 markers in a single layer, and each of them is an image element in dom. Should probably use some marker clustering for that.
Châtelet is there, you have to click on the 3D icon to experience the full majesty of its unending corridors in 3D
There even is a section on Chatelet Les Halles if you scroll down. Insane station.
Zooming working perfectly on my galaxy s23.
Also, Châtelet les Halles is available just after 'Château d'eau".
Jungfernstieg station in Hamburg has its own app to navigate out of the labyrinth even, with (I suppose) official 3D model data [1].
[1]: https://zaubar.com/app?url=zaubar.dev/hochbahn?scene=010
Very impressive work. Was very saddened to see how Ukrainian Kyiv and Kharkiv stations were excluded. We have deep stations (like Arsenal'na at 105m that connects directly to the above-ground Dnipro station on a river bank), we have both Soviet-made and new stations. Also now they are doubly essential being used for both transportation and shelter during air raids by millions.
Why make it easier for an enemy to plan an attack on them.
Reading comments like yours makes me wonder what kind of mental model of the world some people are working with. Russia does not need HN comments to tell them where train stations are.
It’s highly likely that Russia already has detailed models of every stations in Ukraine. If they didn’t before the war, they do now. Mapping public infrastructure doesn’t require a lot of spying.
But you have to understand that information control during war requires a shift of mindset. It’s better to start controlling everything which could be used by the enemy even if they probably already have it than try to establish complex rules. It gives good habits to people.
Most, if not all, of the stations were build during Soviet times. Russia have the original maps of most of them.
Of course they know where the stations are. But they don’t necessarily know the precise local of all the underground tunnels, exits, mechanical rooms, equipment, etc. The underground network is far more complex than what the consumer map hanging on the wall in the station shows.
During the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves.
Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.
I'd like to remind you that Russia is not the USSR. Surely the technology has significantly improved since, but some capabilities are definitely lost. One example is them not being able to build more strategic bombers.
This is why agencies don’t published detailed plans (only schematics) of train stations and airports. I learned this when working on a project for the New York subway in the early 2000s.
Surely they already have detailed schematics? The USSR had a mapping project of hilarious scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bqzwsM6eoQ
A very cool project, and a great resource for people with reduced mobility - I semi-regularly use Transport for London's station drawings (linked on this website) over the official accessibility map, which doesn't differentiate between stairs and escalators for example.
Very impressive work.
I also learned something, which I'd always wondered cynically but never thought to investigate. The walking connection between lines at some stations in Barcelona seems so long as to not make sense, but it's explained here that at the time the different lines and stations were dug and extended independently by different companies.
> Among the reasons for having such long corridors [in Barcelona] is the lack of planning or the vision of the metro network as a bunch of individual lines. As an example: line 1 and line 4 were extended to Urquinaona in 1932, but both lines were not connected until 1972, as they were originally operated by different companies.
In London that’s also mostly true due to the patchwork history of different companies building different lines… however when King’s Cross/St Pancras was redeveloped a few years ago the “official” interchange route between Piccadilly and Victoria lines became much, much longer - minutes of walking compared to seconds. This site doesn’t cover that station, but does link to TfL’s own diagrams via IanVisits, and the reason is clear: at one end the platforms of both lines are almost touching - and I believe that shortcut staircase is still there if you ignore the signs and know where to find it - but the tourist friendly route is much more circuitous, going up to the mainline station and back again. I assume it helps to relieve congestion in an extremely busy station, I remember more than one occasion when they just have to close entry to the platforms during rush hour due to overcrowding.
This is pretty shockingly detailed. I zoomed into my city of Cologne germany thinking there'd be nothing showed here since we don't have a 'real' metro but rather a Stadtbahn system that's partially separate from the street grid and partially on the streets.
Turns out they had excellent descriptions, models and info of all of our stations.
Incredible work!
I first looked at _regular_ stations, but once I understood that it was done by a single guy, I had to look at Paris' Mordor: Châtelet.
The 3D view looks like an ants nest, as expected.
Very impressed by the work done!
> Paris' Mordor: Châtelet.
"Worst of all, the air was full of fumes; breathing was painful and difficult, and a dizziness came on them, so that they staggered and often fell. And yet their wills did not yield, and they struggled on."
The issue with Châtelet - aside from how crowded it is - is that it’s two stations masquerading as one, same as Montparnasse-Bienvenüe.
Once you know what’s on which side and that the directions in the main hall are purposefully made to have you meander for flow control and you can just cut through, it gets a lot more manageable.
If you want to see a ridiculous amount of escalators, take a look at the Collblanc station in Barcelona. It takes 6 escalators to transfer between the L5 and L9S lines.
Pretty impressive! Interesting shoutout to Längenfeldgasse (Vienna) for the cross-platform interchange. This is a pretty popular station to get to Schönbrunn Palace & Zoo, as such the majority of people changing stay on the platform and you really physically see the lean design in motion. This can probably only be done during the design phase otherwise to costly to ever change if it's even possible.
Holy shit! This is an incredible piece of work.
And they are almost all drawn “manually”! I am SO impressed by the dedication
> For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 2,547 stations
> A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station
> Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s
I was never able to build mental model of Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Most of the times was simply following the signs and yup, the layout is complicated.
There is an article in ElPais from 2020 about the author, Albert Guillaumes, and his creative process. Very interesting read! (texts are in Spanish though)
https://verne.elpais.com/verne/2020/08/20/articulo/159791558...
OMG this is amazing! I've checked my station (Velázquez - Madrid) and it is 100% accurate. Also, the 3D stations are insane! ¡Enhorabona!
Nice! Would nice to have Maashaven Rotterdam, being the highest elevated one in the Netherlands. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maashaven_metro_station
With "highest" being a mere ~15m above sea level :p
Yeah all the Dutchies get vertigo there :D
This is a remarkable feat. Amazing.
I’d like to add an interesting metric: density of subway/metro stations as measured by number of stations per square kilometer.
In European cities,
City, Metro System, Stations, City Area (km²), Density (stations/km²):
1. Paris, Metro de Paris, 244, 105, 2.32
2. Berlin, U‑Bahn only, 173, 892, ~0.19
3. London Underground (London Tube), ~270, 1,572, ~0.17
4. Madrid, Metro de Madrid, ~300, 605, ~0.50
Paris takes the lead, not just in Europe but globally, with ≈2.32 stations/km². Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris. Berlin (U‑Bahn only) and London have much lower densities (~0.17–0.19). Rome’s iconic metro is relatively sparse in terms of station density compared to other major European and Asian cities.
Here’s how European and Asian cities stack: 1. Paris (~2.32 stations/km²) 2. Seoul (~1.27) 3. Madrid (~0.50) 4. Tokyo (~0.46) 5. London (~0.17) 6. Berlin (~0.19) 7. Hong Kong (~0.09) 8. Shanghai (~0.06) 9. Rome (~0.057)
Seoul is highest among major Asian metro systems in terms of station concentration, making it the city in Asia with the densest metro network per square kilometer. Seoul has 768 stations in its metropolitan subway system spread across the city proper area of 605 km². By comparison, Tokyo’s combined metro (Tokyo Metro + Toei) has around 286 stations over ~621 km, giving a density of about 0.46 stations/km². Beijing has 523 stations but the city covers about 16,411 km²—yielding a much lower density (~0.03 stations/km²). Shanghai’s figure fluctuates due to rapid expansions: 409 unique stations from early 2025 data.
In addition to density, another interesting metric is the number of street-level entrances (exit/entry points). Counting just stations ignores how many access points are available to the public. More entrances = better coverage, shorter walking distances, improved accessibility, especially in dense urban zones. Examples from Paris are: Saint‑Lazare station (Lines 3, 12, 13, 14) has 11 entrances. Hotel de Ville (Lines 1 & 11) has 7 entrances. Madeleine station (Lines 8, 12, 14) has 5 accesses with 7 separate entrances. Alesia station (Line 4) has 6 entrances. Opera station (Lines 3,7,8) has 3 main entrances.
On average, Paris Metro stations have approximately 3–6 street-level entrances, with major hubs having 7–11. Paris doesn’t just have many stations, it maximizes them with multiple entry points, making its system exceptionally accessible over its territory. Seoul also scores similar in accessibility due to its exit-rich stations, especially in dense areas. Other major metros (Tokyo, Madrid, London) lag when entry points are factored in.
I did not include US cities but I believe New York City might be notable.
> 4. Madrid, Metro de Madrid, ~300, 605, ~0.50
> [...] Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris.
As a native of Madrid, I must point out that using the nominal surface area of the municipality of Madrid (~605 km²) is misleading for these purposes due to the Monte del Pardo [0] and Soto de Viñuelas [1], two fenced off forest areas covering around 180 km² between them. The impact of these areas on the nominal surface area of the city is visually obvious when you compare the outlines of Madrid and Paris administrative areas:
+ Madrid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5326784
+ Paris: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7444
As a result, the relevant surface for estimating the density of Metro stations in Madrid should be at most ~425 km². While one may arguably also want to exclude the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes from the surface area of Paris, even the "de-Pardo'd" surface area of Madrid still contains significant non-urban areas such as the Casa de Campo forest, large non-built-up areas, and even most of its airport.
(In any case though, after this pedantic "well ackshually", I must also point out that a few Madrid Metro stations actually fall outside of its municipal limits. I would get out more, but I live in a town without a Metro)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_de_El_Pardo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soto_de_Viñuelas
Is Paris 6 times smaller than Madrid and 15 times smaller than London? Seems suspicious to me. What exactly is the boundary of this "area" and how does it relate to the subway network?
A significant proportion of the administrative area of Madrid is covered by fenced-off forests. Plus it covers other swathes of non-developed land and even most of its airport. The administrative area of Paris proper, on the other hand, is fully urbanised. See here for comparison:
+ Madrid: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5326784
+ Paris: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/7444
London is a whole different animal. While Madrid and Paris are arguably "similar" cities in terms of urban design and residential density, London and UK cities in general are completely different.
Wow. How?
Incredibly impressive. Is there a public dataset that was used to build this?
The page footnote says that all sketches were hand drawn by the author over a 10 year period, and digitized during COVID by the power of extreme boredom.
So they are not renders of 3D models?
Very nice. One nitpick: Malaga-Fuengirola C-1 line is suburban train and not metro (C stands for Cercanías)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1laga_Metro
Warsaw Metro has 36 station but only one is included. Metro systems of Kyiv, Minsk, Saint Petersburg and Moscow are not shown at all.
Edit: Removed Vilnius as it has only plans for a metro system
Vilnius doesn't have a metro.
Right, my mistake.
Nitpick: there are a couple cities covered in North America as well, so not exactly European.
See also this 3D model of Shinjuku station, Tokyo:
https://satoshi7190.github.io/Shinjuku-indoor-threejs-demo/
Nice, while Shinjuku is much larger and more complex than others it has been really intuitive using it in the real world.
I just had a quick look at a metro station I know, Sèvres Babylone in Paris, and it seems like there's a mistake in the model, adding a corridor that doesn't exist in the actual station.
Really state of the art project and available in catalan, hell yeah! Hats off
Very nice work, consider also eventually adding Athens and Thessaloniki stations.
Wow. The one relevant to me looks spot on accurate.
Well done!
Is there a reason why moscow is missing ?
Probably because he didn’t manage to visit.
The guy has probably not been there. There are tons of others not included but it's fine, just a guy.
It says "European", not "Asian".
West of the Urals is Europe. Istanbul is included, and that’s even more questionably European than Moscow, I think.
It's also not an exhaustive list anyway. At least Helsinki, Finland is missing. I think Finland is unambigiously Europe.
Did you skip geography?
Very impressive project! Congrats.
Love this project. Back in my transit blogging days, one of the themes was short and long transfers. And here this idea immediately starts surfacing just looking at the stations - the crazy mazes with long tunnels are cool to explore on paper, but suck for actual transfers. It adds slogs in the middle of the trips, and kind of discourages transit use because trips seem longer and more work.
When scrolling down, the author actually includes a long discussion on the best possible transfer layouts! Many of the terrible stations over time are of course historically grown, evolved over time, and weren't the result of some maniac evil genius deciding to create miserable transfers. Systems are built sometimes over a hundred years, so a later station is added mostly where it can fit, not a as a result of some master plan.
But there's also ways to deal with these issues, which can be found in Berlin.
1) for the recently opened "Unter den linden" station, which is a transfer between a new extension (u5) and a 100-year-old line (u6), a station on the old line was actually moved by 180m so that the transfer would be good. (That is, the old station was closed and a new station built a bit a distance away)
2) in general in Berlin, especially after WWII, a lot of the subway construction followed a very long term master plan (to the extend that West Berlin actually planned a network for all of Berlin, even though the East was in another country behind the iron curtain). When stations were built, the planners "knew" it would be a transfer some day, so they added in accomodations ("Bauvorleistung" or preparations ahead of actual construction), often whole station shells for the future line it would connect to. This resulted in a lot of short transfers even when lines were built decades apart. And it also resulted in a bunch of ghost stations, which have yet to be connected to lines.
This is impressive work!
The product of extreme focus and obsessive dedication. It showed me my local subway station immediately and everything checked out. Great resource.
Finally going to get a mental model of Jungfernstieg, Hamburg after a decade of living here. Wow.
Xing Zhilei's cats enter the chat and demand detailed texture maps.
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Perhaps it doesn't work on my browser, but all I see are low fidelity, wireframe/stick 3D model projections rendered as 2D images without much detail that could be made in a few minutes.
As the title suggests it is not a website of models of European metro stations because:
(a) it contains models of North American stations, and
(b) it does not contain stations from the St Petersburg[1] or Moscow metros which are significant European metros (the Moscow metro[2] is the longest in Europe)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg_Metro
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro