Corrections, 4 September 2026
* Two railways that carry a train and had no line drawn on them joined the map. From Pitești a CFR regional runs 142 km west to Craiova, on rails opened on 9 May 1878 as the Pitești to Craiova to Vârciorova section, six years after the line from Bucharest had reached Pitești and still an unelectrified single track. From Varna a BDŽ regional runs 107 km inland to Shumen through Provadia and Kaspichan: everything east of Kaspichan is the first railway built in what is now Bulgaria, the Ruse to Varna line of 1866, and the last 24 km into Shumen opened on 20 June 1895. Both are drawn from their own OpenStreetMap relations, both are on real railway for every metre of their length, and both sit on the shape of the train the planner runs along them with nothing measurable between the drawing and the service. Neither was found by looking at a map: a sweep measures, country by country, which railways carry a scheduled train and have no atlas line within a kilometre and a half of them, and these two came off the top of that list for Romania and Bulgaria. _Found by the atlas’s own audit sweep._
* A third line joined them, and it fills the emptiest corner of the map in this part of Europe. Eastern Serbia had one atlas line anywhere near it, the Belgrade to Niš trunk, and nothing at all in the Timok valley. The regional train from Zaječar now runs on the map the way it runs in the timetable: 111 km to Niš in two hours and forty eight minutes, through the Svrljig gorge, where the railway passes through nineteen tunnels. The line was finished in 1922, late for a Serbian main line and for a reason, the work having been interrupted by the First World War and finished afterwards partly by Russian emigre labour. Its own drawing comes from the OpenStreetMap relation for train 2741, it is on real railway for every metre, and the planner puts our line and the train on the same rails with nothing measurable between them. _Found by the atlas’s own audit sweep._
* And a fourth, which is a border crossing rather than a branch line. The R Zakarpatia leaves Chop in the far west of Ukraine, crosses into Slovakia at Cierna nad Tisou and runs on to Kosice, 104 km in three hours and nineteen minutes. It is the kind of line this atlas exists to show: the two countries use different track gauges, so Chop is where a train changes between them, and a reader looking at the map could not otherwise tell that the crossing carries a scheduled passenger service at all. The Slovak half of it dates itself precisely, because its own line article lists each section as it opened, and the last of them, Kosice to Michalany, opened on 22 October 1873. _Found by the atlas’s own audit sweep._
* A fifth, and it is the loneliest line added in a long time. The regional train up the Ibar valley from Kraljevo to Rudnica runs 77 km in two hours, past the spa towns of Mataruska Banja and Josanicka Banja, and there was no atlas line within a hundred kilometres of it in any direction. The rails were completed in 1931 to carry ore north out of the Ibar mines, which is the fact that dates the card: Serbian Wikipedia has no article for this railway, so the year comes from the history of the mines it was built to serve, where the line is named in full. Every one of its fifteen stations sits within seven metres of the line as drawn, which is the closest fit of any card added today. _Found by the atlas’s own audit sweep._
* Two British main lines were missing, and the larger of them is the second railway between London and Birmingham. The atlas drew the West Coast route from Euston and nothing else, so the Chiltern Main Line out of Marylebone, 180 km through High Wycombe, Bicester, Banbury and Leamington Spa to Birmingham Snow Hill, had 164 km of track no line on the map came near. It is a different railway from the one beside it rather than a second drawing of it, and it dates itself: the Great Western built it in three phases and finished it in 1910 with the Bicester cut-off, which shortened the run by thirty kilometres and let it match its rival on two hours. The other is the West Coastway, 73 km along the Sussex and Hampshire shore from Brighton to Portsmouth, built by five companies between 1840 and 1889 and ending on piles out over the water, at a harbour station opened on 2 October 1876. _Found by the atlas’s own audit sweep._
* Photographs. Eleven routes that had never had one now do, each found by searching for the stations the line actually calls at and then opening the file to look: a railcar at Knin, another at Ormoz, one at Bleiburg, a train at Beli Manastir, Trenord units on the Bergamo lines, a locomotive at Warszawa Zachodnia, a Vouga railcar working to Espinho, a train on the Beira Alta viaduct at Rocamondo, a railcar at Entroncamento and a GySEV Ventus. Four more had a photograph too small to be a hero, under 600 pixels wide, and the worst of them sat on one of the busiest pages here: the Rome to Naples card showed an empty stretch of track with no train on it at all. It now shows a Frecciarossa at Naples. Oslo to Gothenburg has the train that actually runs it, Monte Generoso its rack train on the mountainside, and the Niesenbahn its funicular car on the bridge over the Kander. Every crop was measured against the band the hover card really shows and then looked at, which is how the Chop to Kosice card was caught cropping to a stretch of platform concrete with the train pushed out of frame. _Found by the atlas’s own audit sweep._
* Then the same question was asked of the whole atlas, and the answer was that the crops are fine and the photographs repeat. Of 1,347 cards whose crop could be compared against a fresh measurement, ten differed enough to look at, and on seven of those the measurement was the thing that was wrong: moving the crop would have pushed the train out of the frame. Those were left alone. What the sweep did find is that 23 photographs were doing duty on 53 different cards, which the atlas has a rule against: one picture of an ICE was the hero of four German routes and one Frecciarossa of four Italian ones. Every group of three and four is broken up, and each card now carries a picture tied to its own line, an ICE on the Hohenzollern bridge at Cologne, a railjet at Budapest Keleti, another at Poertschach above the Woerthersee, a Frecciarossa under the roof at Venezia Santa Lucia. Three more cards were illustrated by photographs with no train in them at all, and two of those are fixed: Sierpc had two semaphore signals and now has the double decker that works the line, and Sarajevo to Banja Luka had an empty building and now has a train crossing the valley. Sixteen cards still share eight pictures between them, because nothing better exists on Commons for the second of each pair, and one of those pairs is deliberate: the Brussels to Luxembourg card was given a photograph of its own, which turned out to show a station entrance and no train, so it went back to sharing a locomotive with its neighbour. A shared photograph that is right beats a private one that is wrong. _Found by the atlas’s own audit sweep._