Use OpenRailwayMap on your mobile device with OsmAnd

Alexander Matheisen
Thu, 11 Jun 2015 22:30:08 +0200

Now you can use the OpenRailwayMap overlays in OsmAnd, a mobile app for Android and iOS devices. At the moment it requires an active internet connection. There is still a lot of work for generating offline maps, but you can help us!

Using OpenRailwayMap on mobile devices is now easier: OsmAnd, an app running on Andriod and iOS devices, offers integrated support for OpenRailwayMap. You can easily add the different layers of OpenRailwayMap as overlays. Have a look at the wiki howto.

Now you can use features that the mobile website cannot offer: The alignment of the map in any direction or the visualization of your own position. Also very interesting is the possibility to combine the railway overlay with any other background map, such as aerial imagery. However, there is one limitation: The overlays are loaded dynamically, which requires an internet connection. Offline usage would be nice to have, but is currently not implemented due to some problems:

The generation of ready-to-use downloadable offline maps requires more server resources and bandwidth that are currently not available. There won't be a solution for this problem soon, but the open data of OpenStreetMap allows users to generate offline maps on their own. The necessary steps are documented in the OSM wiki.

Currently, however, there is the problem that the existing OpenRailwayMap stylesheet, written in MapCSS cannot be used due to an specal OsmAnd format. Writing stylesheets for OsmAnd means a lot of work, in particular the continuous synchronization with the MapCSS files requires some effort. Developing a tool for converting MapCSS stylesheets to the OsmAnd format would be one approach to avoid a lot of manual work and make life easier. That would also ensure that both online and offline maps look almost identically. For both tasks, supporters, who are interested in using OpenRailwayMap on mobile devices, are welcome.