Ten railway cameras worth opening, from Zermatt to Tokyo Station
At 13:01 UTC today a red railcar stood at the south end of Zermatt station, and the track behind it ran under a concrete avalanche gallery and into a tunnel mouth cut in the hillside. That camera looks down over the whole village from the side of the valley, and the railway takes up the right-hand third of the frame. I pulled the frame three times this morning and it came back stamped 13:01:07, 13:11:07 and 13:21:07, so the ten minute refresh is real rather than nominal. By the third one the railcar had moved down the track towards the gallery.
Zermatt is the right place to start a list of railway cameras, because there the railway is not scenery. It is the only way in. The village is car-free, private vehicles stop at Täsch, and the shuttle covers the last stretch in 12 minutes with a departure about every 20 minutes. Everything that arrives in that frame arrived on rails.
Here are the others I opened today, roughly in the order I would open them again.
Two Swiss stations, and a viaduct just round the corner
Filisur is the quieter of the two and the better photograph. The camera sits above the station and looks along the platforms of the Rhaetian Railway's Albula line, with the slope behind them already gold and the valley opening out past the far end. Two frames I fetched this afternoon were stamped 13:13:48 and 13:24:28 UTC, about eleven minutes apart. Up the line is the Landwasser viaduct, 142 metres long and 65 metres high on five stone pillars, which is the thing everyone photographs and which this camera politely does not show. What it shows instead is a working mountain station: a few cars at the platform end, the overhead wire, nobody about.
Zermatt I would open in the morning rather than now, because at 14:00 local time today the sun was flaring straight into the lens from over the ridge. Filisur at 13:13 had the light coming in from the side and down the platform, which is the version of that view worth having.
York, from the roof of the signalling centre
The York camera is live video rather than a refreshing still, and it is mounted somewhere no railway photographer gets to stand. Network Rail put it on the roof of its Rail Operating Centre in York together with Railcam UK, for what it calls a bird's eye view of the comings and goings at York station, and it went live on Yorkshire Day in 2019. The stream running now started on 17 April 2024 and had 53 people watching it at 13:33 UTC today. Fifty-three, on a Friday lunchtime, for a fixed shot of a station.
The other British one is a preserved line, and the timing matters more there than anywhere else on this list, because a preserved line only has trains on the days it says it does. Bewdley South is the Severn Valley Railway's own camera and the railway describes it as a view from the platform of Bewdley station. The SVR is open for autumn half term from 24 October to 1 November 2026, and its Ghost Trains ran 29 to 31 October and are fully booked, so tonight and tomorrow are the last of those.
The American diamonds
Four more are RailStream's, which publishes fifteen locations and names the railroads and the rough traffic on each camera's own page.
- Fostoria, Ohio is the one to open first if you want movement rather than scenery. RailStream's page lists CSX and NS and approximately 70 or more trains a day. Seneca County's tourism office, writing about the viewing park on the ground, says an average of 80 freight trains daily through a triangle where two CSX lines and a Norfolk Southern line cross as three double track mainlines. There is a second Fostoria camera, the one RailStream calls East, for when the first is looking the other way.
- Chesterton, Indiana is Norfolk Southern and Amtrak at the same stated 70 or more trains a day, provided in partnership with Riley's Railhouse. I like that this camera exists because somebody beside the tracks wanted it to.
- Fullerton, California carries BNSF, Metrolink and Amtrak past one camera, in partnership with the Fullerton Train Museum. It is the only one here on Pacific time, so it is the one still in daylight when the eastern cameras have gone dark.
- Shenandoah Junction, West Virginia is the quiet one: CSX with MARC and Amtrak, about 30 trains a day, against a coffee roaster's name rather than a railway's.
Tokyo, late
Tokyo Station is run by Nippon TV's railway department. Their stream has been going since 22 June 2026, it is tagged for stations, trains and shinkansen, and they describe it as a live feed for checking the state of Tokyo Station in real time. It was live when I looked at 13:46 UTC, which is 22:46 at night there. If you want a station doing the thing stations do, that is a reasonable hour to catch it: last departures, and then the platforms lit and empty.
What we do with these
Every camera here is re-fetched on the daily check, and each one above was also opened by hand today at the time given. Stated refresh intervals are the weak part of any camera directory, ours included, because the interval a source publishes and the interval a camera keeps are different numbers. So I measured Zermatt's by pulling three frames 600 seconds apart instead of trusting the stored value, and I would rather do that for every still camera on the site than for the handful I happen to touch in a week. That is the next job.
The open question is level crossings. A crossing camera is the best kind of railway camera, because something is going to happen and you can see it coming from the lights and the barrier, and most of the ones I know about are in Japan. If you run one, or watch one, and it has a stable public URL, I would like to hear which it is.