Planes, Trains and Automobiles

1 Quick start

Load a point layer of places (cities, ports) with a text field of names.

Open the plugin panel (toolbar icon or Plugins menu).

Under Source, pick the point layer and the name field.

Choose a route type, set a destination or build a route, then press Add / rebuild animation layer.

Press Play — in the panel or the toolbar play/pause button.

📌

Every layer the plugin makes goes into a route-tracker layer group, so your project stays tidy.

2 Route types

🌎 Fan (in / out)

Pick one hub, then use the Fan-in / Fan-out toggle: fan-in draws a leg from every place to the hub (arrivals); fan-out draws a leg from the hub to every place (departures). Timing can make them arrive together or run at a constant speed.

📍 Route (multi-leg)

An ordered path through waypoints you pick: origin → stops → destination. Add stop appends; Up / Down / Remove arrange the list. Each leg departs when the previous arrives.

3 Vehicles

✈️

Plane

Flies over land

🚢

Ship

Detours around land

🚘

Car

Land only

🚃

Train

Land only

🎨

Custom

Your SVG/PNG

Custom opens a file picker for your own marker. Use Marker rotation if it isn't drawn pointing right/east (a nose-up marker needs about −90°).
Ship legs detour around land using a bundled coastline mask; landlocked places are refused.
Car / train are land routes; a leg that would cross open sea is skipped (fan) or refused (multi-leg).

⚠️

The coastline mask is low resolution. Ship detours use open-ocean routes and may skip canals or graze narrow straits. This is a visualisation aid, not a navigation product.

4 Style & editing

🎨 Style

Set trail and marker colours, widths and sizes. Toggle a faint full route ghost and arrival markers. Reapply style only restyles without rebuilding.

✎ Edit selected

Loads a layer's settings back into the panel — change its stops, timing, style or vehicle, then Apply changes to rebuild it in place (same layer, same group slot).

5 Play together & export

Build several layers — they appear in Animation layers and play in lock-step off one shared clock.
Play / Stop / Loop and the scrub slider drive the animation; Duration and FPS set length and frame rate.
Export PNG sequence writes frames plus an ffmpeg command to encode an MP4; Export & open HTML viewer writes a self-contained web page that plays them.

6 Saving

💾

The animation layers and playback settings are saved with the QGIS project. Reopen a project and the panel reappears with its layers ready to play.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (plus others) · animated transport routes for QGIS

Planes, Trains & Automobiles