Rail transportation data, from network geometry to live departures. · Head-to-head
SNCF Open Data Portal vs Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry
Which rail transportation data, from network geometry to live departures. data fits your job: SNCF Open Data Portal, or Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry. API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
SNCF Open Data Portal
Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry
Coverage, side by side
| SNCF Open Data Portal | Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry | |
|---|---|---|
| Geographic | France only, but at source depth - national TGV, Intercites and TER timetables, Ile-de-France Transilien lines, ridership for roughly 3,000 stations nationwide | Worldwide, with country browse pages for the US, Canada, France and all others; Amtrak, commuter rail, metro and bus operators alongside bikeshare fleets |
| Temporal | Timetables roll 151 days ahead; station ridership spans 2015 to 2024 annually; infrastructure snapshots run since 2003 | Live feed index plus historical feed versions retained since each feed's registration, deduplicated by content hash |
| Granularity | Per-station annual passenger counts, per-train scheduled stops, per-line infrastructure attributes, two-minute real-time trip positions | Feed-level records down to agency, route and stop entities, plus real-time departures per stop |
What each contains
They tie on 1 attribute. Pick by fit, not by loyalty.
| SNCF Open Data Portal | Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry | |
|---|---|---|
| Geography | France only, but at source depth - national TGV, Intercites and TER timetables, Ile-de-France Transilien lines, ridership for roughly 3,000 stations nationwide | Worldwide, with country browse pages for the US, Canada, France and all others; Amtrak, commuter rail, metro and bus operators alongside bikeshare fleets |
| Temporal reach | Timetables roll 151 days ahead; station ridership spans 2015 to 2024 annually; infrastructure snapshots run since 2003 | Live feed index plus historical feed versions retained since each feed's registration, deduplicated by content hash |
| Granularity | Per-station annual passenger counts, per-train scheduled stops, per-line infrastructure attributes, two-minute real-time trip positions | Feed-level records down to agency, route and stop entities, plus real-time departures per stop |
| Scale | 166 catalogued datasets in one operator's catalogue; the national timetable archive alone runs to tens of megabytes | Thousands of registered feeds across four specifications |
| Field dictionary | 8 documented fields in our dictionary, definitions verified | 10 documented fields in our dictionary, definitions verified |
| Subjects covered | Timetables, real-time disruption, ridership, infrastructure, corporate finance, HR, safety and CO2 series | Feed discovery, feed health, archived versions, operator relationships, per-stop departures |
| Formats delivered | CSV, JSON, GeoJSON, GTFS, NeTEx, GTFS-RT, SIRI, ZIP archives | JSON records, raw GTFS and protobuf payloads, vector tiles |
| Best for | Deep single-country rail research inside France - timetables, station demand, track and electrification studies | Multi-operator and multi-country feed discovery, archival version pinning, fleet-wide feed monitoring |
Or take both in one feed
They stack cleanly into a home-market-plus-everywhere workflow. A mobility app can serve its French core from SNCF's timetables, real-time alerts and station counts, then lean on the registry to discover and monitor partner feeds as coverage expands abroad. An analyst can benchmark French station ridership trends against peer operators' networks found through the registry's operator pages. A data engineer can use archived feed versions to reproduce last spring's model inputs exactly, then keep the French leg current through the Transilien feed's steady supply cycle.
Two practical notes from the records. Align identifiers before joining - the SNCF side keys on UIC station codes while the registry keys on Onestop IDs, so the bridge runs through station coordinates or agency names. And respect the temporal grain mismatch: one side counts people per station per year, the other counts files per feed per fetch, so combined analytics should aggregate upward deliberately. Or take both in one feed.
API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.
Fair questions
Is SNCF Open Data Portal better than Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry?
For anything about French railways, yes; for anything crossing a border, no. The SNCF portal holds 166 datasets covering national timetables, two-minute real-time feeds, ten years of station ridership and infrastructure layers, while Transitland indexes thousands of feeds worldwide but records availability rather than ridership. Match the dataset to where your question lives.
What do SNCF Open Data Portal and Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry have in common?
Vocabulary more than substance. Both dictionaries describe transit in the same genus - identifiers, spec types, temporal windows, status flags - with 8 verified fields on our SNCF side and 10 on the Transitland side. But the rows describe different objects: French stations and trains versus registered feeds and their archived versions.
Which dataset covers more geography, SNCF Open Data Portal or Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry?
[Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry](/datasets/rail-transportation/transitland-open-transit-feed-registry), decisively - thousands of feeds across every continent, browsable by country, including Amtrak and commuter rail alongside bikeshare and metro operators. The SNCF portal covers France alone but goes far deeper there: about 3,000 stations with annual ridership, every TGV, Intercites and TER timetable, and track-level infrastructure layers.
Which has finer granularity, SNCF Open Data Portal or Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry?
It depends on the axis. The SNCF portal resolves individual trains to two-minute trip updates and individual stations to annual passenger counts, while Transitland resolves to feed versions - each changed file hashed, timestamped and retained. For operational detail inside France the SNCF portal wins; for provenance precision anywhere on earth, the registry does.
Do SNCF Open Data Portal and Transitland Open Transit Feed Registry overlap at all?
Only at the edges. Transitland registers French feeds and SNCF publishes in GTFS, so a Paris-area schedule can appear in both - but the SNCF portal adds ridership, infrastructure and corporate series the registry will never hold, and the registry adds worldwide coverage and versioned archives the portal will never hold. Treat them as complementary layers.
Which one should a rail analyst sample first?
Sample both, pick by fit. Analysts studying French stations, timetables or infrastructure start with the SNCF portal; engineers building multi-country journey planners or needing reproducible schedule archives start with Transitland. Teams serving French users today and expanding tomorrow can take them merged into a single delivered feed.