Check the Current Location of Indian Trains on Google Map

The current location of Indian Railways Trains on Google Maps

The Indian Railways has just launched RailRadar, a useful website that shows the current geographical location of any train on a Google Map.

To get started, you can zoom-in to any location /city on the map to see all the trains which are arriving at the station or have just departed. Or you can use expand the left sidebar to search trains by name, by train number or by the station name.

If you click a particular train, the map will also show the exact route of the train including all the stops and the current location of the train. The train markers highlighted in blue indicate trains that are running on time while the red markers indicate trains that are delayed or behind schedule.

The press release says that the train data is refresh every 5 minutes and the displayed location and running status of any trains displayed on the Google will always be delayed by at least 5 minutes.

The site is extremely useful and it will work on your mobile phone as well.

See all your Google Contacts on a Google Map

Create a Map of your Google Contacts

If you have been using Google Contacts (or any other address book*) to store the postal addresses of your friends and colleagues, you can easily create an online Google Map with all these address or even view them inside Google Earth. Here are the steps:

1. Make a copy of this Google Sheet in your own Google Docs account.
2. From the Google Contacts menu in the sheet, choose Initialize and authorize the script  (see source code) to access your Google Contacts.
3. Next choose Generate KML under the same menu and the script will send a KML file to your email account.

Go to your mailbox and download the KML file to the desktop. You can double-click this file to directly open it inside Google Earth. You can click the pin /marker to read the full address and name of the contact.