TrainSnap

I’m a daily bike commuter that needs to cross over the train tracks in the early dark of the morning or late dark of the night. Neither of which is a fun time to hang out next to a parked freight train for a hour. With the ever increasing length of freight train cars those waits can literally be more than an hour! Now I just check this app when I leave home and reroute when I’ve seen the crossing closed for more than a few minutes! This morning it was listed closed for an hour so I rerouted and saw the stopped train as I took a bridge over it!! Opportunity for improvement- the notifications function isn’t useful given the frequency of times the gates go down for a Max train. A 2 minute closure for the Max train isn’t the problem with these intersections - it’s the stopped freight trains. So maybe a specific alert only for freight trains or when gates closed for >5 minutes. I think geofencing is a great idea as suggested by another reviewer! This app has really improved my QOL and I’m looking forward to more improvements & hopefully more train track crossing inclusions!

Why has this app only recently came to life?!?! My wife was in labor and we quickly headed toward OHSU. Luck have it, the railway car blocked our way in such an urgent time. We had to wait over 20 min for the train to pass, if we had this app at that time we could have made the decision to go around. We won’t have to worry about next pregnancy thanks to this thoughtful app. Thanks a bunch inventor of Trainsnap!

Looking forward to further development. Hope SE 11th is coming soon. Wonder if there’s a way to forecast a closure, even by a few minutes?