Building a machine-translated railway news aggregator

One of the side effects of the fracturing of the social media landscape has been it has become harder to follow breaking news that has niche importance.

If it’s the big questions of war and peace, sure, we all still see it. But what is happening in European railways – the news I need to follow the most for my work – is now split between Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn (where the algorithm complicates it all further), and various newsletters and messenger groups. Add onto to that the linguistic complexity – I can read English, French and German (and Dutch, Swedish and Italian at a push) – but some important news comes out in Czech, Polish or Romanian and I felt I was forever missing things, and unable to structure my news consumption.

So it was time to go back to the roots: back to RSS that I have been using for two decades, coupled with machine translation.

First decision: what RSS reader? Due to the demise of Netvibes (for years my favourite tool) I settled on NetNewsWire for Mac and iOS. It’s free, open source, simple and fast, and also synchronises unread stories between desktop and mobile.

Second decision: what RSS feeds to follow? This one is more complicated, and is a bit of an ongoing task. Not all the news sources that I want to follow have RSS feeds, and it took a bit of hunting to find the ones I did want to follow. These are all listed at the bottom of this post, and I might in due course add some and remove some as well. The focus was on non-paywalled sources, but there are few paid ones in the list too.

Third decision: how to get all of this translated? Luckily I have people in my network much better at coding than I am! Oliver Blanthorn was able to make a RSS Translator Proxy system for me within a few days. At the moment we are still testing this, so cannot make the content from it publicly available, but the code is available for free if you want to have a go on your own server. A further issue we have faced is hitting machine translation API limits pretty quickly, and hence we are currently translating only the first 500 characters of the text of a feed, but that is enough to know if the whole story is worth reading.

And does it work? Yes! Yesterday it dug up this story about a tram-train project in Oradea, Romania that has cross border relevance that I otherwise would have missed. And this morning gave me the latest news about Subotica – Novi Sad. These will be the first of many. The next step will then be to work out what I can best do with these stories I am digging up – some sort of hand selected “Most interesting international rail news of the week” could be something I might consider making.

Anyway, here are the sources in the system currently, in alphabetical order! Links are to RSS feeds in the site’s original language. Please leave a comment below if you think there are others I should add!

Bahnblogstelle – Germany, German – Site | RSS
Bahnonline.ch – Switzerland, German – Site | RSS
Club Feroviar – Romania, Romanian* – Site | RSS
Eisenbahn.blog – Austria, German – Site | RSS
Ferrovie.info – Italy, Italian* – Site | RSS
International Railway Journal** – International, English – Site | RSS
Järnvägar.nu – Sweden, Swedish* – Site | RSS
LOK Report – International, German – Site | RSS (note: this one produces LOADS of stories!)
Mediarail – Belgian, French – Site | RSS
Portugal Ferroviário – Portugal, Portuguese* – Site | RSS
Railcolor** – International, English – Site | RSS
Railtech** – International, English – Site | RSS
Railway Gazette** – International, English – Site | RSS
Rynek Kolejowy – Poland, Polish* – Site | RSS
Treinreiziger – Netherlands, Dutch* – Site | RSS
Trenvista – Spain, English – Site | RSS (note: Trenvista is originally in Spanish, but has its own machine translated version!)
Zdopravy – Czechia, Czech* – Site | RSS (note: site covers multiple transport modes, RSS for rail only)

And if you want to follow this blog via RSS, here’s the main feed. Or put /feed after any category or tag URL!

* – indicates sites that I am currently machine translating (but the RSS Translator Proxy could translate other languages too!)
** – site either partially or fully paywalled